Marie Antoinette at 20: Sofia Coppola’s playfully postmodern period drama is finally getting the praise it deserves

This autumn, a unique event is taking place in the Petit Trianon, the small summer house tucked among the formal flowerbeds of the sprawling Château de Versailles estate.

Walking through its rooms, visitors can admire bold pink floral arrangements while listening to music by New Order. It’s been created in homage to Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film, Marie Antoinette.

The film, shot on location at Versailles, is being thrown an extraordinary 20th birthday party. Scenes and sets have been recreated in the very rooms where the teenage queen (played in the film by Kirsten Dunst) once escaped the rigid hierarchies of court life.

In this mingling of fact and fantasy, visitors encounter Marie Antoinette’s real Sèvres dinner service. Alongside it are the elaborate food props created for Coppola’s film by art director Anne Seibel and Michelin-starred chef Marc Meneau. Portraits of Marie Antoinette by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun hang alongside mannequins styled to resemble Dunst.

More than 200 films have been shot on location in and around the buildings and grounds of Versailles, but this is the first exhibition dedicated to a single film.

Coppola worked with curators Laurent Salomé and Hélène Delalex on the exhibition’s artistic conception. The result is an extraordinary and uncanny experience: the Petit Trianon filtered through the dual sensibilities of filmmaker and queen.

Here, visitors see with particular clarity how both women constructed cloistered worlds designed to nourish a sense of self and preserve girlish pleasure. At the same time, both relied – perhaps too much – on privilege and image to sustain them.

Ahead of its time

Coppola’s Marie Antoinette was booed at its opening screening at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2006. It flopped commercially, barely breaking even on its US$40 million (£21.7 million) budget. Coppola did not make another film for four years.

It is all the more gratifying for fans of the film, then, to see it grow in stature and appreciation. On its 20th anniversary, Marie Antoinette is receiving renewed attention and, finally, the cultural prestige that I believe its audacity warrants.

Criterion has released a 4K digital restoration in its prestigious collection, accompanied by voice-over commentaries, deleted scenes and an essay by girlhood scholar Claire Healy. Directed by Sofia’s mother, Eleanor Coppola, The Making of Marie-Antoinette will be released in November.

Why, then, two decades on, is Sofia Coppola’s film receiving the popular and critical recognition it deserves – celebrating its audacious decision to tell the story of an 18th-century queen through a pop-art lens?

Part of the answer is that she anticipated a mode of historical fantasy that has since become mainstream: the deliberately trashy Regency of Bridgerton (2020), the tongue-in-cheek profanity of the Russian court in The Great (2020), and the gleefully revisionist 18th-century world of The Favourite (2018).

But it is not simply that Coppola’s playful postmodernism has become more culturally legible. She announced her intentions with extraordinary clarity from the very beginning.

Playful postmodernism

The film opens on a black screen, the credits appearing in hot pink. Natural’s Not in It by Gang of Four plays (“I do love a new purchase / a market of the senses”) as the sequence cuts to a tableau.

Dunst, dressed in a white silk corset and petticoats, white feathers plumed in her hair, reclines on a dove-grey chaise longue. A maid places a shoe on her outstretched foot, while she lazily scoops a fingerful of thick pink icing from a cake beside her.

As she puts her finger into her mouth, she turns and looks directly into the camera. She acknowledges us. This is a woman conscious of being observed: by the court, by the camera, by the viewers.

If Versailles was famous for its Hall of Mirrors, it also anticipates the world of social media, in which representations pass from screen to screen in endlessly referential loops. The Gang of Four lyrics connect the acquisition of objects to sensual pleasure and the construction of a desirable lifestyle – making Dunst’s Marie Antoinette an influencer avant la lettre.

Yet the film retains a melancholic bite. In an era of post-austerity financial constraints, climate breakdown and unpredictable geopolitical events, its depiction of a world teetering towards crisis – while devoting itself to the curation of ever-more exquisite lifestyles – has an uncanny resonance.

Watching Coppola’s film projected onto the stone walls of the Petit Trianon, the very rooms in which Marie Antoinette lived, visitors are reminded of the bloody end that awaited the charming young woman we see dancing before us.

This is a film that places a girl’s-eye view at the centre of a convulsive moment in world history. And Coppola insists that her experiences and feelings matter.

The film is a manifesto for the particularity of girlhood: an insistence that growing up as a girl is a distinct experience, shaped by the expectations imposed upon female bodies and identities.

If even the most privileged girls feel the weight of oppression and expectation within a world governed by images, what does that mean for those without the same levels of material comfort?

Coppola’s Marie Antoinette was released into a cultural moment dominated by consumerism as empowerment, when “girl power” was used to sell music and fashion to young women. The film’s counter-message – that such power is strictly limited, blunted on one side by a bloated, patriarchal establishment and on the other by the outrageous poverty behind Marie’s pleasures, of which she was barely aware – felt anachronistic and irrelevant at the time.

Now, in the post–#MeToo era, as Donald Trump serves his second presidential term and rising right-wing populism underscores deep-seated social injustices and income inequality, Coppola’s film feels all too prescient. Marie Antoinette’s time has finally come.

Fiona Handyside does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.