Marie Antoinette as a character only intersects with reality in two places. One when she first arrives at the Palace and has to go through the utterly baroque and overly complicated rules dictating decorum and all actions in the royal court; we see her being dressed by the highest ranking court lady in her bed chamber and the long list of servants that are involved in serving her food. Another is when the Palace is surrounded by French Revolutionaries and she actually walks out to confront them on the balcony. This and a few other times when King Louis has meetings with his advisors about supporting the American Revolutionary War (this very funding which ironically led to economic troubles in France, which led to the French Revolution) or in the only laugh out loud moment in the movie, when we realize the reason Louis and Marie had not been able to produce a royal heir was that they were not having sex and not aware that this was necessary!!! That last bit was my favorite of the whole movie.
The rest of the movie solely focuses and revolves around this sort of dream life that Marie Antoinette leads. She wanders from party to a clothes fitting to another party to and orgy of sweets to a masquerade ball to her house in the country where she playacts farming and takes a lover. And on and on as the years pass, punctuated only by her initial efforts to procreate and subsequent royal births, since she is barely aware of the world outside of Versailles, nothing seems to change.
This was certainly an interesting way to with a film; as I said there is very little of the roiling history that was taking place at the time, the movie is just focused on the life of a young, relatively innocent and certainly naïve and insulated teenager who just happened to be the Queen of France. It gets points for all of the glorious filmography, though much of the credit goes to the fact that the location was Versailles, which director Sophia Coppala had full access too. The inclusion of the Academy Award winning costume design (yes, Tara hated it, shout out) and the glorious sweet and chocolate design are also all very nice. However, two things make it not my kind of movie. One, I actually like all of that history stuff, especially when it is as interesting and momentous as the French Revolution, and we only got the merest tastes of that in this movie. Secondly, as magnificent and decedent as the trappings of the royal court of Versailles, I still felt the story was about a frivolous girl who never really matured because she never really had any hardship in her life and thusly did not change as a character. A beautiful film and certainly an interesting take on the subject matter, but not to my taste.