 Sofia Coppola rejected the advice of "stuffy professors" like historian Caroline Weber. Thus the portrait of the queen, as played by Kirsten Dunst (left), has little to do with the historical figure (right). |
If you choose to see Sofia Coppola's new film, Marie Antoinette, this month, do so knowing that the blue hat she wears on the day she arrives in Versailles to meet her future husband was a "laughably inaccurate choice." So says Barnard College historian Caroline Weber, who has written her own book on the tragic French queen, published last month: a biography entitled Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. In fact, Weber explains, the vogue for hats was something Marie Antoinette herself introduced, only a decade later.
Does that matter? Is the Barnard associate professor just being pedantic? Far from it. In Weber's view, by not taking Marie Antoinette's fashion choices seriously the movie misses one of the main points about how she wielded power. Indeed, the doomed French queen's acute fashion sense—not just her hats but also her penchant for sporting three-foot-high "pouf" hairdos—was a tool that she used to assert her legitimacy in a court looking for every excuse to deny her a rightful role. "As I show in Queen of Fashion," Weber explains, "Marie Antoinette was actively complicit in creating her own mythical image—that of the all-powerful queen."
Weber admits that she enjoyed seeing the the young Coppola's film. "As a child of the '80s, I loved the director's decision to use '80s pop music on the soundtrack, and many of the scenes she shot at Versailles and the Petit Trianon are gorgeous from a purely visual standpoint."
Nevertheless, she found the film's portrayal of Marie Antoinette "reductive, facile and downright wrong." She also regrets that Coppola turned down her offer (made through fashion designer Marc Jacobs) of serving as an advisor on the film, as she didn't want any "stuffy professors" involved. Weber says she would have encouraged Coppola to "depict Marie Antoinette with more psychological depth and complexity," instead of merely recycling "the insouciant, 'let them eat cake' queen of legend."
Weber's approach has much in common with that of historian Marina Warner, who has produced several works on prominent women in history—most notably, Joan of Arc and the Virgin Mary—showing how they have been mythologized over the years.
"As Marie Antoinette certainly discovered," Weber explains, "the myths that quickly attached to her name had little to do with the image she herself set out to create. She also became the target of other people's myth-making, as the press reinvented her as a heartless spendthrift."
Related Links
Caroline Weber's 10/21/06 op-ed for the New York Times: "Queen of the Zeitgeist."
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