Jogging the memory

A few days ago I was prompted by the NYRB to get a copy of the Sofia Coppola film 'Marie Antoinette', which I did not recall having read about, let alone watched, before. The prompt included two major strands. First, the story was that Marie Antoinette was a prototype version of our Princess Diana - and there are certainly some striking similarities in their stories. Second, the film was made by Sofia Coppola, whom I rightly assumed to be the daughter of the famous Coppola. Did the film acquire class by association?

We have now consumed the film, taking two sittings over it. The major irritation was the occasional burst of loud modern music which, for us anyway, clashed badly with the lush period settings (including the Palace of Versailles itself) & the costumes & the wigs & all the rest of it. Luckily the batteries in the remote were in good shape, and the offending sound responded to finger-tip control.

The film told the story more or less from Antoinette's marriage in 1770 until the day the Royal Family were brought back to Paris from Versailles by the mob in 1789, nineteen years of marriage, of which it took maybe seven for the consummation. The film is reasonably vague on the cause, concentrating rather on the effect, but suggests that it was the visit of her brother, the Emperor of Austria which finally got the ball rolling, as it were, in 1777. This is the story of the fat tome (see below), but as it happens I came across a different version this very morning, in a book about Catherine the Great, a near contemporary lumbered with a much worse husband, but one who was equally incompetent in the bedroom department, an incompetence dealt with by a minor surgical intervention, with the story being that it was the same surgical intervention which sorted out Louis. But while Marie Antoinette was pretty incompetent all round, Catherine the Great was competent all round and survived a dreadful young womanhood to go onto great things.

The film concentrates on Antoinette's private and court life and tells us nothing about her political interventions. Or about the bad effects of her favouritism. Tells us little about Louis' political activities, beyond his insisting that the French spend treasure they did not have on helping the Americans with their independence. But what it does tell, it tells rather well, capturing well the strange life of the court invented by Louis XIV to control his turbulent nobles, a machine which Louis XVI never learned to drive properly. The strange mixture of luxury, dissipation, intrigue and vacuity. Coupled with the royal duty to live more or less in public, more or less the whole time. All of which spawned Antoinette's much derided desire to get away from it all, to play milkmaid, in and around the Petit Trianon.

Kirsten Dunst does pretty well as the adult queen, but failed, for me, to capture very well the plight of a 14 year old girl sent out of Austria, into France, being literally stripped of all things Austrian at the border. Child abuse indeed, followed by a hopeless child husband in a court awash with intrigue.

Coppola seems to be fascinated by elaborate confectionery, with her having the French court consuming vast quantities of the stuff.  All lovingly captured on film and I associate this morning to the rather darker but also very lush work of Peter Greenaway. No idea whether the French were so keen on sweets, but since quite a few of the details of the film were based on facts, perhaps this one was too.

After the event, I remembered that I possessed quite a  number of books and memoirs which bore on the subject. For one the fat, possibly remaindered, tome by Jean-Christian Petitfils mentioned at reference 2 and with wikipedia suggesting that Petitfils is something of an expert on the whole business. For two a couple of interesting books by Chantal Thomas. For three a fine memoir by la marquise de La Tour de Pin. I even have some letters of Ferson. All of which lay undisturbed in some remote corner of the brain until after we had watched the film. So once again, prompted by watching a film to stir up prior knowledge and interests.

The parallels with Princess Diana, while real enough, did not, in the event, get any traction. I am not moved to stir that pot. But a related pot which one might stir, or at least think about, is what exactly was it about Antoinette which drove the massive production of torrid stories, pretty much all untrue, about her love life. OK, so the first part of her marriage was the talk of France, but so what? Could one really build so much stuff out of a non-event? Was it all no more than a way of letting off steam which did not have any more productive outlet under the ancien regime? Was it much the same as our own fascination with the love life of celebrities? One of the Chantal books may well bear on the matter, so maybe I will read it again. Maybe it will all come back to me.

Furthermore, I think we might actually take a look at the 'making of' bit chucked in with the film. Not the sort of thing I usually bother with.

PS: not just memory trouble this morning as I was also persistently reversing the o and the i in Antoinette. So finger trouble too.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=antoinette.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=louis+XVI.