18th century blog

Marie Antoinette (2006)
This is one of my favourite movies. It guess it doesn’t really have much of a plot, but it’s extremely gorgeous to watch, and it’s one of those movies where the music fits so well with the pictures that the (already good) songs become even better than on their own. Kirsten Dunst plays Marie Antoinette, and while the way she is portrayed isn’t exactly like my own vision of Marie Antoinette, I think she’s amazing and so charming and beautiful. I also love Rose Byrne as Polignac.

While the 1938 Marie Antoinette movie focuses on the last part of her life, this one is almost all about her early days at the French court, which to me is more interesting. It doesn’t aim at perfect historical correctness but I think it’s still fairly correct.

The clothes and sets are absolutely gorgeous. It’s probably the most beautiful movie I’ve seen. The only thing that bothers me a little is that while many of the hairdos are great, some of them, particularly Marie Antoinette’s poufs, aren’t that great, and don’t look much like the actual poufs of the 1770s. In the documentary on the DVD someone says they wished they could have put more effort into the hair, but they put all of the effort and money into the clothes so they didn’t have time, or something like that. I would love to see what the movie would have looked like if they had been able to do more with the hair. Some of the hair you see on the extras is better though, strangely enough.

All in all I think this is an amazing movie and I watch it very often. You can see some more movie stills and promotional pictures behind the cut.