"Absolute Beauty" is a historical drama film released in 2006, and to this day, "Absolute Beauty" is still polarized by evaluation. What kind of movie can have such an extreme reaction?
Following the success of Lost in Tokyo, audiences are highly anticipating Academy Award director Sophia Coppola's next film. The film premiered at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, and the audience booed after the film. At the same time, there are also many senior film critics who give praise and express their love for it.
The Magnificent Queen is the third feature film directed by Sophia Coppola, the previous film Lost in Tokyo, which won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and was nominated for Best Director and Best Film in 2004. Sophia Coppola's films usually revolve around women and the world in which they live.
In male hegemony in Hollywood, her films full of feminine thinking are unique. Loneliness is a common theme in her films, and this one is no exception.
The Queen tells the story of a young Austrian princess, Marie Antoinette (Kerstin Dunst), who marries into France, and in Versailles, full of etiquette and gossip, she numbs herself and her duties as queen by luxury taste buds and shopping habits, and eventually, her profligacy leads to tragedy.
Marie Antoinette was the last queen of France and the source of the French Revolution (for those of the time), and being beheaded after the Revolution also established her position as a sinner in history. This is evident from her most famous anecdote: when the French people didn't have enough food to eat, she said, "No bread to eat?" Let them eat the cake!" The image of an ignorant, ignorant and profligate queen has long been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people.
"The Queen of The Dead" re-examines the notorious queen in history, from a superior who is impersonal and does not understand the sufferings of the people, to a young fashion icon who is trapped in international politics and has no mental age to grow up. In Sophia Coppola's eyes, she was not a sinner, she was a young girl who had been born queen in the wrong era.
"Absolute Beauty" is definitely not an orthodox historical drama. Sophia Coppola jumped out of the traditional framework and the thinking of "how to shoot historical figures", adding a lot of modern elements and 80s rock music to the film to interpret the young girl's state of mind. Using the visual and auditory conflicts of the 18th and 20th centuries, the audience's endurance is challenged.
Sophia Coppola's narrative perspective is a double-edged sword. "Absolute Beauty" still has the director's unique female thinking, and her unconventional presentation has been praised by film critics.
At the same time, she cuts to the point that a young and superficial upper-class elite, it is difficult to resonate with the audience, which eventually leads to the polarization of film evaluation. The nasty person can't stand the superficial historical protagonist and the visual exaggeration, but the person who likes it loves her to depict the shallowness of the material life of the teenager and the erosion of the state of mind.
Below I'll add a few things about Marie Antoinette's character history to understand the entry point of "Absolute Beauty", a young girl who has been put on the throne in a big environment, and the idea behind director Sophia Coppola's visual creativity.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="54" > Teen Queen, King: A Family In a Political Marriage</h1>
Marie Antoinette, the 15th child and youngest daughter of Empress Maria Teresa of Austria, was a political bargaining chip for maintaining friendly relations with her neighbors. The Empress married her 14-year-old daughter to France on the pretext of defusing Austria's hostile relations with France.
At this time, Marie Antoinette's Versailles was a fairytale place, and her fiancé was a handsome and attractive prince. She came to France in such a false fantasy and expectation.
On the French side, the situation is not much better. The introverted and shy Louis XVI, who was still a 15-year-old teenager at the time, knew nothing about sex, had no intention of getting married, and worse, had been living in an environment where Austria was an enemy country, so the thought of having a relationship with Marie Antoinette (a collection of things he feared) terrified him to the extreme. This also sowed the seeds of public opinion and unhappy marriage in the future.
One is a 14-year-old young girl, the other is a 15-year-old teenager, this marriage is undoubtedly a family, but this family is burdened by The international relations between Austria and France, and the future of France.
When Marie Antoinette arrived at the border between Austria and France, a handover ceremony was required. She had to take off all her clothes and everything related to Austria, and any small object or pendant that could remember her hometown needed to be left behind.
She wanted to drop her Austrian identity and enter as a Frenchman, which made Marie Antoinette, who was still a child, cry. In The Magnificent Woman, Sophia Coppola amplifies the deprivation with a puppy, and when the puppy is taken from the arms of Kstein Dunster, the audience can also feel the sense of deprivation from her struggling face.
This handover ceremony is undoubtedly a political demonstration, there is no humanity to speak of, only the display of power, and Marie Antoinette's illiberalism is about to begin.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="62" > the Palace of Versailles, the cage where Marie Antoinette lived</h1>
After stepping into France, Marie Antoinette, as a princess, had no privacy to speak of, and her bed with Louis XVI and her every move were all gossip after the tea and dinner in Versailles.
On the first night after marriage, the second night... For months, or even years, Louis XVI did not touch his wife, much to the disappointment of Marie Antoinette, and versailles' tedious etiquette, gossip, and unhappy marriage continued to widen the queen-to-be's loneliness.
In 1774, the 4th year of entering the Palace of Versailles, the 18-year-old Marie Antoinette officially became Empress of France.
Even so, the two have not had sex yet. The whole of Versailles was tirelessly discussing the king's sexual incompetence and the queen's failure to give birth to an heir to the throne. Not only Versailles, but all of France knows that Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI are at odds with each other, but it also makes the people question the ability of the king and queen to govern the country - what can a couple who can't even get their family done?
Marie Antoinette had almost never left versailles in her life, and she didn't know the real France, nor did she want to. She only knew the world inside Versailles, and even spent a lot of money to build her own small Trianon Palace, a small garden, so that she and her aristocratic friends could dress up as shepherds and peasant women, and play in her fantasy of France.
Her actions were ridiculed across the country, and the accumulated resentment began to blame all of France's internal problems on the still naïve queen.
France's problems were never created overnight, and the problems left by the financial aid that supported the War in the United States and the previous rulers put France on the verge of bankruptcy. Louis XVI's inability to govern the country was also thrown at Marie Antoinette. The people need a source of anger, and the tabloid media see this.
Their massive smear of Marie Antoinette, with explicit drawings of the Queen having sex with multiple men, not only led to a surge in tabloid sales, but also amplified the people's hatred of Mary Antoinette. Even the most famous "let them eat the cake" was a malicious slander of the fake news at the time.
Marie Antoinette's greatest fault was nothing more than her ignorance, ignorance of the situation in France, underestimation of the influence of newspapers and magazines on her image smear, and lack of awareness as queen, and she was too late to take on the responsibilities of becoming queen of France.
As depicted in "The Queen of Perfection", when she arrived at Versailles, she was still a young girl who only wanted to party, gamble, shop, and see handsome men, and she was not happy in marriage, and she relied on shopping to fill her inner loneliness.
After learning about the history of Marie Antoinette, I feel that I can better understand the perspective of director Sophia Coppola, and why she uses gorgeous vision and modern music to highlight the contradiction between the naïve girl's state of mind and the environment.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="74" > Cinematic Visual Design: A Macaron Color Feast</h1>
"The Queen of The Dead" does not pursue an accurate and proper historical presentation, but it is not far from the same visually. The French government specially approved the film team to shoot at the Palace of Versailles, and even opened the open and maintained mirror hall and Marie Antoinette's bedroom for the camera team, so the picture is very good Rococo wind.
In the film, we don't see France outside of Versailles, and the audience can only follow Marie Antoinette's perspective and be locked up in her ignorant little world, never peering into the real France of the 18th century.
Inspired by the French dessert Ladurée, Sophia Coppola's costume design and colours are full of macarons, not only embellished with Marie Antoinette's girlish heart, but also visually flooded with her corrupt luxury, which reaches its peak in the queen's shopping scenes. I'll break down the next clip to see how the director is visually achieving this conflict.
The clip begins with Marie Antoinette hearing that the king's brother has given birth to a boy, and the news leaves her powerless and saddened by her situation. In the sprawling room, Marie Antoinette's shrunken figure in the corner appeared particularly small, as if she were a young girl trapped in a golden cage. In the next second, the picture is immediately filled with shoes, fans, desserts and other items, like a queen immersed in materialism, shopping to fill the picture and the inner void.
The 18th-century style footage is paired with Bow Wow Wow's "I Want Candy", and the audience enters the inner world of the queen and still a girl. Using the music of our time, Sophia Coppola playfully adds Converse's tall canvas shoes in the background, implying that the past has nothing to do with the modern, and That Marie Antoinette is a young girl.
In a montage of about 80 clips in just 3 minutes, every second of the picture is filled with clothes, food, gambling chips and cards, just as Marie Antoinette paralyzed herself with substances, and our vision is also confused and paralyzed by color.
This playfulness, combined with visual conception, highlights the contradictions of the character of Marie Antoinette. This goes back to the earlier reasons why the film has mixed reviews, some people think such a role is too childish, but others think that "The Absolute Woman" perfectly presents the real-life Marie Antoinette.
Marie Antoinette is a superficial, beautiful young girl who lives at the top of society, but she carries responsibilities far beyond her ability to cause the tragedy of history and the black name of her life.