Marie Antoinette


Posted on Apr 22, 2008
By Julia Szabo

Sony Pictures, 2006, 123 minutes
 
Add this title to your Netflix queue
 
If they gave an Oscar for creative canine casting, this film would have won - and not just because Bow Wow Wow's on the soundtrack. Director Sofia Coppola uses dogs to humanize her heroine, starting with the first scene, showing young Archduchess Antonia (Kirsten Dunst) at home in Austria, asleep in bed with her Pug.
 
Traveling to meet her betrothed, the future French king, a.k.a. Dauphin (Jason Schwartzman), Antonia is ceremoniously stripped of her old identity and wardrobe, and made over as the Dauphine. Without warning, her beloved pet is snatched from the devastated, weeping queen-to-be. "We can have as many FRENCH dogs as we like," remarks Judy Davis as the Comtesse de Noiailles (very and-your-little-dog-too).
 
Taking key liberties with history, Coppola adds anachronistic 1980s music and puts words like "Wow" into Marie's mouth. Such flourishes invite us to empathize with someone not that different from us, thrust into a position for which she wasn't prepared - and the dogs drive the point home.
 
Coppola populates the court of Versailles not with butterfly-eared spaniels called Papillons, the real Marie's favorite pet - she even named the breed - but instead with today's most popular lap dogs: Jack Russell, Italian Greyhound, and Pug. In one scene, a tiny Chihuahua - favorite pet of this century's party girls - munches on a decadent pastry.
 
Dogs help elicit sympathy for history's most reviled figures, and their familiar screen presence in this movie softens the "let 'em eat cake" persona that's come to define the doomed teen queen. 


Presence of dogs: reelreelreelreel
Respect for dogs: reelreelreelreel
Canine star quality: reelreelreelreel
Family friendly: reelreelreelreel


 

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