jane dark's sugarhigh!

marie antoinette

It's the cotton candy you bought one humid day by the canal, dissolving so swiftly it seemed to be gone before you put it in your mouth, not a taste, perhaps nothing more than a mood, to be recalled even an hour later not as an experience but as it feels to remember remembering. Insubstantial but not nothing.

Nor is it finally all that different from The Virgin Suicides, which had far less content than it was given credit for, but was a fine accompaniment to its soundtrack by Air: A French Band. It felt like something, vague and slight but something; the vagueness and slightness were its virtues, the affect it meant to convey. Both these films are successful in their mild ambitions, their whiff of burned sugar and xanax: Ambient Cinema Americain.

Still, it remains an open question why one would want to set one's little affect machine in the French court during the (narratively collapsed) years 1770-1789. The affect in question is notable, perhaps, exactly because it isn't anything as decisive as happiness; we are to understand, perhaps again, the weight of St-Just's revolutionary claim that "Happiness is a new idea in Europe" falling backward onto all the estates. But this alone wouldn't justify the simultaneous invocation/suppression of events that have as substantial a claim on world-historical drama as, say, Columbus' voyage or WWII.

Answers involving irony, or the depiction of oblivious nobility (complete with Paris Hiltonesque gestures toward pre-industrial forms of the cult of celebrity) are finally insufficient: even these raise the film to the level of critique, and it's hard to imagine anyone taking the movie thusly after actually seeing it. Thus we are tempted into psychologizing the auteur: the story of the poor little rich girl, born and then again delivered into an incomprehensibly-contoured world of privilege, glamour and public visibility which would offer her anything but real experience and the possibility of being taken seriously, proved finally irresistible to the director, and damn the context.

Surely this remains the least interesting way to decide to understand things. Perhaps, if we are to think about Sofia Coppola in such terms, we would gain more by recalling that, in the language of Antoinette and St-Just as she is spoken now, the phrase for cotton candy translates as "papa's beard." As it often seems, the gender dynamics of the French language are curious; do not the perfectly unrebarbative color, sweetness and texture of cotton candy signify the traditional opposite of the beard's masculinity?

By the same token, Marie Antoinette, a film populated almost entirely by women, makes a sort of complement to Apocalypse Now, populated only by men. Both of them, in extraordinary ways, are films of war without war. The present film might be a sort of fantasia on the most terrifying scene of Apocalypse Now, when Willard, in search of provisions and information, wanders and crawls through a detonating landscape illuminated by a firefight, fireworks, or the inferno. It's sort of beautiful. Over and over, Willard asks where the CO is, who's in charge, where can he find them? Nobody knows the answer; more awesomely, nobody cares. They just shoot their guns in some direction or another. Things explode. It comes down to this:

WILLARD
"Who's the commanding officer here ?"

SOLDIER
"Ain't you ?

It's a vacuum. Not a war any more, lacking sides or orders or strategies. Or it's war without content, just the empty form, the firing of guns and launching of rockets, and no one recognizable to anyone else other than just somehow being part of it, sucked into its howling vortex and the ambition of leaving entirely forgotten.

Marie's Versailles, and her Petit Trianon, are not hell; they're paradisal. But paradise too is contentless; life reduced to form, to which traces of affect still cling. And this is the feeling, finally, of the movie: the feeling of contentlessness, the affect of missing affect, a very different kind of vacuum from the one directed by papa's beard — but a vacuum just the same, a vortex of candied hearts and coronations, war without war, happiness without happiness, the vague and slight paradise before the invention of life.

Posted by jane at July 18, 2006 12:54 AM | TrackBack