Style over substance

Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette lacks any real depth but the film is still a triumph and the less said about The Guardian the better. By Declan Burke

The lady is not for turning. The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation were largely greeted as triumphs of style over substance, but Sofia Coppola's latest offering, Marie Antoinette (12A), which she writes and directs, is virtually all style and no substance. Nonetheless, it's still a triumph.

Kirsten Dunst (pictured) plays the young Austrian princess who marries the Dauphin of France, Louis (Jason Schwartzman), in order to bolster relations between the dominant European powers of the late 18th century. At first taken aback by the indulgent excesses of the French court, the naïve ingénue soon learns to embrace the trappings of wealth.

Unfortunately she proves too enthusiastic a pupil for her own good; as the peasants starve for the want of basic necessities such as bread, the cake-guzzling Marie Antoinette becomes a hate-figure to the ordinary French people.

That Coppola guillotines the movie just as the narrative is moving towards the most interesting aspect of the doomed queen's life is a perverse and belated statement of intent: Marie Antoinette is not concerned with the trivial or the gruesome, but with conveying the extent to which the upper-classes wallowed in almost unimaginable luxury. In this Coppola succeeds magnificently; rarely has a film looked so beautiful on screen in recent times, nor can one have been so determined to identify so closely with its recurring motif, in this case the luscious cakes that foreshadow Marie's infamous (mis)quote.

Coppola's fudging of the issue of whether Marie Antoinette actually says, "Let them eat cake" – a harridan-like Marie states it baldy, only for a softer Marie, the one who has become a mother and changed her wicked ways, to immediately deny she would ever think of saying such a thing – is emblematic of the lack of character at the heart of this film. While the world of Versailles is impeccably detailed, it's almost impossible to sense any depth to the queen herself. If that's a deliberate decision to highlight the absence of responsible leadership in the French royal family at the time, it works superbly; less charitable viewers might say Kirsten Dunst simply lacks the depth to explore such a complex personality. But even that gaping hole at the heart of the story doesn't diminish the quality of the film as a whole; ironically or otherwise, both Coppola and her Marie Antoinette have their cake and eat it.

In The Guardian (12A), Kevin Costner plays a veteran of the coast guard schooling a young and ambitious lifeguard, Ashton Kutcher. The gist is that those who concentrate on saving lives often neglect the lives of their nearest and dearest; that may be a noble theme, but offering it up wrapped in a soggy Top Gun rehash is a good way to ensure it sinks without a trace. Some excellent camerawork on the rescue scenes apart, The Guardian is the dampest of squibs.

Marie Antoinette ****

The Guardian **