Could You Use a Guillotine to Edit a Film?
If you can’t trust a PR release, what can you trust?
“Dunst Film Going to Cannes
Kirsten Dunst’s new period movie Marie-Antoinette has been selected to compete at the coveted Cannes Film Festival in May. The Sofia Coppola-directed film, co-starring Shopgirl actor Jason Schwartzman, sees a 19-year-old Viennese girl became the queen of France in 1744 – before being famously beheaded.
Jason Schwartzman apparently will be playing H.G. Wells who uses his time machine to rescue the light-headed queen. Taking her back in time to 1744–11 years before she was born–Wells hopes that she can persuade Louis XV to reform the government and avert the French Revolution. Unfortunately, Louis XV only thinks of hitting on the cute, buxom fraulein. The smitten lecher offers her the run of France; Madame Du Pompadour is assigned to running a post office in Quebec. With Marie Antoinette in charge, the French Revolution now begins in 1759.
Frederick the Great uses the turmoil in France as an excuse to invade. Wells now realizes that he may have started World War I 155 years too soon—and Germany will win this time. So, he has to use the time machine again, retrieving a short, mumbling Corsican lieutenant. Unfortunately, the French army assigns the lieutenant to the defense of Quebec rather than Paris. Frederick wins the war in Europe mais en Amerique Nord l’histoire est tres different.
“Coppola Defends ‘Marie-Antoinette”
Director Sofia Coppola has hit back at critics who mauled her new movie Marie-Antoinette as an attempt to Americanize French history. Coppola’s film chronicles the life of the tragic French queen during the revolution in the 1790s. It has been criticized for its American pop video feel, but Coppola insists she wanted to accentuate the youthful slant to the story. She says, “I wasn’t making a political movie about the French revolution, I was making a portrait of Marie-Antoinette and my opinions are in the film. We modernized certain things that were relate-able to me and a modern audience. The story is about teenagers in Versailles, so I wanted it to have that energy of youth and teenage feeling to it.”
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In her film “Marie Adolescent”, Director Coppola has taken these liberties (if not equalities and fraternities) with French history:
Marie Antoinette never went surfing on the Seine.
She did not have a fleur-de-lis tattoo on any part of her body.
She never said “Let them eat pizza.”
Perhaps she would have used the Hope Diamond as a tongue stud, but she never thought of it.