![]() ![]() This party-scored by New Order’s “Ceremony” - is characteristically youthful and bursting at the seams with energy and joy. This party is presented in contrast to Marie’s birthday, a few scenes earlier. The tension between wanting to be forgotten and admired, to be free but also seen are exemplified by the song. For the Queen of France, that means to disappear from the public consciousness, to be freed by anonymity. Marie longs - like all good teens - to be outside her life. ![]() The opening track on The Strokes’s sophomore (and best) album Room on Fire, the song begins with the declaration: “I want to be forgotten.” Which she does, at this moment. The opening chords of “What Ever Happened?” burst with her. Tired of feigning interest, she excuses herself and bursts into the cold, endless halls of Versailles. Late in the film, she drifts through a quiet boring party. She wants what everyone wants: to understand and be understood. ![]() She is lonely and her yearning is palpable. This is, perhaps, why Marie emerges as sympathetic despite her wasteful and careless lifestyle. She loves being at the ball, but hates being there with her husband and the boring company he keeps. Marie finds herself at the crossroads of the same emotional extremes in this scene. The song was born out Siouxsie Sioux and John McKay’s love of a restaurant - the Hong Kong Garden - and hatred for the “skinheads” who populated it. “Hong Kong Garden” has been called the most important early post-punk hit. The restless joy of the night mirrors the song Coppola chooses to score it. For a second, as bodies whirl around each other, it looks like a pit. A string intro to “Hong Kong Garden” by Siouxsie and the Banshees that explodes into its original form as Marie enters the swirling mass of dancers. ![]() You think, “Wait I know this … is this …?” And it is. As she enters the ball - looking decadently goth in an all-black ensemble - strings pluck softly. This unlikely union is most in sync at the heart of the film in which Marie suggests she and her entourage sneak away from Versailles to attend a masked ball in Paris. For two hours, she tracks her protagonist (a tour de force performance from Kirsten Dunst) as she roams the grounds, pushing the boundaries of what the Queen of France can do and be. In “Marie Antoinette,” she builds a Versailles that is at once suffocatingly full and excruciatingly lonely, and then sits in it. We can draw a distinction between the character and her historical counterpart because Coppola isn’t making a factual biopic, she’s making an emotional one. ![]()
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