Sofia Coppola re-engages the discussion of what film is in a surprisingly well directed and acted rendering of the married life of France's Marie Antoinette. This is Kirsten Dunst's finest role since Mona Lisa Smile.   View Movie Trailer through IMDb.com

A visual extravaganza, Marie Antoinette shows us the fifteenth child of Austria's Empress who is chosen to forge an alliance with France through a marriage to Crown Prince and Heir Apparent Louis-Auguste of France. The year is 1770. The marriage of Marie Antoinette to Louis the Dauphin of France will make her Dauphine and next to wear the crown of Queen of France.

In Marie Antoinette, a young girl snuggling her little lap dog in her arms awakens on a glorious and sunny early spring morning. She is dressed by royal attendants and presented to her white-haired mother, the Empress of Austria, Maria Theresa. It is only now that we learn that a young, sweet-spirited and innocent Marie Antoinette (Maria Antoina) is standing before us about to embark on her journey to France to embrace a political union to a heretofore unknown prince.

Marie Antoinette had an infamous time of it with her marriage to the incomprehensibly shy and ill-informed Dauphin Louis, causing her much personal suffering, and, according to Sofia Coppola's direction, propelling down a path of infamy which eventually contributed to the impoverishment of the French nation and people. Starved by taxes, these French people stormed the Bastille and subsequently decapitated as many of the overindulgent aristocracy as they could lay hands on. The new King Louis XVI is reported by Ms. Coppola as having uttered the words, "God help us. We are to young to reign," at the declaration of his sovereignty on the occasion of his father's death. Apparently he was right.

Director Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation), who also wrote Marie Antoinette, has succeeded in creating a radiant new expansion of the visual art form of motion pictures. And she has surprisingly combined contemporary elements, like music and dialog, with period, like costume and customs, in a way that reveals universal human characteristics. Well done. It is a combination that shows a contemporary Marie Antoinette, despite her hairdos, panniers under petticoats and assigned political role; a Marie Antoinette as contemporary as you or your neighbor. This presentation of universal human traits is enhanced by the actors' delivery of contemporary lines, like the discussion of inflammatory news stories, in their own native accents, effectively bridging the centuries and making antiquity a thing of the present and very Now.

In the early years of motion pictures a great discussion took place via the big screen addressing the questions: What is a motion picture? What can it do? What can it be? Is a motion picture only a way to peer beyond the proscenium arch and capture for posterity the performance on stage? The discussion led to the ultimate realization that the camera has locality, selectivity, perspective and relativity. It can change location and is not limited by the proscenium arch of the stage; it can selective parts of the whole to look at; it can see from different angles and with varying clarity; it can see things relative to other things.

Sofia Coppola, daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, has essentially reopened the discussion of what a motion picture is and has actually turned the debate backwards. In Marie Antoinette, Ms. Coppola has reissued a statement of the original fundamental revelation of film: Film is visual.

Just as the visual experience of Marie Antoinette is surprising and stunningly beautiful, so is the acting surprising and stunningly well done. I had my doubts about Kirsten Dunst (Mona Lisa Smile) as Marie Antoinette, but Ms. Dunst's exquisitely and subtle expressiveness and emotion make her the perfect choice. Her character development--going from young innocent to mature mother and misguided Queen, from calm, expectant confidence to shattered anxiety and frenzy--brings Marie Antoinette's personal journey out of disinterested historical abstraction into present experience and humanity. Jason Schwartzman (Shopgirl) as Louis XVI was equal to his role as co-star: His journey from bashful bungler to confident Prince and dotingly indulgent King is a lock-and-key complement to Ms. Dunst's role. This is critical to the success of Marie Antoinette because Ms. Dunst's and Mr. Schwartzman's portrayals generate a heart-felt sympathy for Marie Antoinette which is essential for expressing the idea of the universality of human emotional experience (a favorite of theme of the American writer, William Faulkner). These two shine particularly brightly in an all round superior cast, and Ms. Dunst is surely looking at an Academy Award nomination.

One of the more prominent ideas that Ms. Coppola shows with vivid clarity in Marie Antoinette is that emotions, conflicts, miscarriage of motives in actions are searingly the same today as in antiquity. Certainly, the situations and social circumstances are on the whole very different, but inner torments and conflicts borne of desire, expectations, misunderstandings and mistakes, jealousies, ignorance and failures are as much the rule now as then. Universalities.

Another prominent idea in Marie Antoinette is that governments, when led by ignorant or inexperienced rulers who are used and manipulated by conniving advisors (any of that sound familiar?) can destroy whole peoples and the very existence of government. As Marie Antoinette says while quoting Rousseau, the natural state of people is to be free, and a house divided against itself by vain and self-serving counsel; by ill-judged expenditures; by manipulating advisors and foolish rulers will fall. A heady concept for consideration in the present milieu.