I watched Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, starring Kirsten Dunst, for the costumes, and was not disappointed on that score. The movie is quite a feast of frock coats, ruffles, printed fabrics and improbable wigs. There are also many yummy images of confectionery, which was a bonus, and obviously some shots of Versailles, though I didn’t think the setting was exploited to its full potential. The movie has been criticised for its shallowness, and my impression throughout most of it was that this criticism was well deserved. We see a lot of Marie Antoinette getting dressed and undressed, buying shoes, gossiping, gambling, going to the opera, and playing at being a shepherdess. The revolution comes at the end but the film finishes with the royal family fleeing Versailles; it dosn’t follow them to the execution block. By that stage I half had the feeling that I was watching an alternate version of history in which they escaped - perhaps to Austria, perhaps to a faerie Cythera where the matter of life is made of love and shoes and cake and playing cards, not bread shortages, national debt and angry mobs. Somewhere before then, perhaps when Marie was showing her friends around her “village” in the grounds of Versailles, or maybe when she awaited a lover in coquettish costume, I got the feeling that I was not watching a shallow engagement with history but a plunge into a young girl’s dream. I certainly recognised the fantasies (let’s not forget that Marie Antoinette was only 14 when she was married to the Dauphin).

The film could be viewed as an allegory about growing up and leaving one’s fantasies behind; even, at a stretch, a story about the female imagination at odds with the demands of the world (much emphasis is given to the pressure on the young queen to produce a male heir, when she would rather be playing with lambs and a harmless, dashing suitor). Maybe it really is just a film about wigs and shoes and cake, but I’d like to think there’s more to it than that, and that the tendency of society at large to dismiss the female imagination as frivolous, while indulging no end the male imagination’s dreams of war and heroics, will cause us to miss what we could actually get out of this film - namely, the possibility of a world that works a very different way to the world we’re familiar with: a world where people work less and fight less, and budgets are spent not on bullets but bonbons and bows - and bread, for that matter. A couple of short scenes are given to the matter of French finances. France must support the American revolution, a minister urges, “to show our strength”. At first glance we think the minister is talking about something important. Then we realise that “to show our strength” may be as inane and decadent a reason for spending money as Marie’s desire for a beautiful, showy life - nothing but the peacock displaying his tail.

The film could also be read as a caution against the consumerist decadence of our own times, of course - but that would be less interesting. Unfortunately I haven’t seen any of Sophia Coppola’s other films, so I don’t have a background against which to place this one. And, heck, it may just be a fun piece about clothes and candies and lambs. Which, for my money, is more entertaining frivolity than yet another movie about men killing each other and stuff blowing up.