WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

The Queen

(Transcript)
Originally broadcast October 20, 2006

	Milos Stehlik

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This week may see the beginning of the boxoffice battle of the Queens. British filmmaker Stephen Frears was first with The Queen—his droll portrait of Queen Elizabeth II in royal denial over the public grief at the death of Princess Diana. Helen Mirren as Elizabeth is brilliant—cold, an eerily compelling study in frigidity. But what makes this performance so dynamic is that Mirren also portrays the Queen as intelligent. She is pragmatic and cunning, yet has a vulnerable streak.

The real drama in The Queen, is supplied by the tabloid press, which feeds on the scandal and drives the public into an escalating frenzy. It is this media culture from which the Queen feels disconnected, while the eminently “modern” Prime Minister Tony Blair lives for the front page moment. He is conscious of image and how it needs to be manipulated.

If the presently reigning British Monarch is in denial because she feels her former late daughter-in-law is not deserving of a state funeral, the teenage queen about to hit the American boxoffice, Marie Antoinette, is an Austrian import into the stuffy French monarchy where her husband, Louis XVI, just doesn’t know how and doesn’t care to have sex. He prefers to tinker with watches and to hunt.

Poor Marie Antoinette amuses herself with ordering more pairs of shoes and pastries, and figuring out how to sneak out of the palace in disguise in order to have some real fun.

Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is being sold with the fury of a new and improved soap detergent. It is expected not only to prove that a historical subject can connect to a internet-savvy audience, but start a new revolution in fashion, bringing back the frou-frous of the 18th century. Can men wearing wigs be far behind?

One of the treasured moments of the Cannes Film Festival this year was the world premiere press screening of Marie Antoinette. The huge theatre where the film was shown at 8:30 in the morning seats about 4,000, most of them sitting in the enormous balconies. When the film was over, there was a smattering of applause from the balcony. Almost in disbelief, after a pause, the audience in the orchestra reacted to the people in the balcony with a loud “Boo!” Of such stuff legends are made.

Marie Antoinette is an enormously difficult undertaking, beautifully shot in Versailles and its grounds, with mostly terrific acting, and, in my opinion, one serious and fatal miscalculation.

How to make this history come alive for modern audiences? Keep the costume, change the idiom. Kirsten Dunst plays Marie Antoinette like an overly hormonal valley girl with one mission in life: shop until you drop.

The contrast here with Helen Mirren’s studied, insightful and intelligent performance as Queen Elizabeth is astonishing. What Kirsten Dunst knows is to pout, and to speak in American English, so she says “ya” instead of “yes” and so on. You are always conscious of the subtext, “Hey, I am playing Marie Antoinette. Look at me!”

The performance is so empty as to be irritating and throw the whole film off balance. There are wonderful performances from the male cast—Jason Schwartzmann as Louis XVI, Rip Torn as King Louix XV, and from Judy Davis as the Comtesse de Noialles, Marianne Faithful as Marie Therese. But the glue which should hold them connected is missing. The character of Marie Antoinette, as played by Dunst, is a dysfunctional, narcissistic shell which throws into relief just how disconnected from history and historical reality and how misguided this attempt to “modernize” the era and character of Marie Antoinette and connect her to suburban teenagers truly is.

Oddly, both The Queen and Marie Antoinette are films in which the royalty is in crisis. Both queens, Elizabeth II and Marie Antoinette, were ill-equipped to deal with the social and historical changes which confronted them. But Helen Mirren is a queen who, though unaware of how disastrous her refusal to act is for herself, the monarchy and her people, has the flicker of an internal struggle. All Marie Antoinette can think of is to buy another shoe, eat another pastry.

At the end of watching Marie Antoinette, you ask yourself, what was this about? The answer is, “not much.” As for Kirsten Dunst, is this someone you could date? Not really. She may be beautiful, but is she ever boring!

This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.

Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.

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