Historians Blast Dunst's Marie Antoinette

imdb.com ^ | 10/3/06

[paudio]

Actress Kirsten Dunst has come under fire from historians for her "frightful" interpretation of tragic French queen Marie Antoinette. Dunst plays the 18th Century monarch in Sofia Coppola's racy new biopic, which was booed by critics at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Now her overtly sexual performance has been attacked by France's Marie Antoinette Association as well, who insists the queen's bedroom antics are not factually based. The association's president Michele Lorin says, "I've seen the trailer for the film on the internet. It is a fright. We've spent years trying to convince people that the queen was not just a libertine who told the starving to eat cake. What do you see on the trailer? You see Marie Antoinette eating cake. You see her lying naked on a chaise longue. I fear the film is going to set us back many years." However, Dunst retorts the movie should not be taken too seriously. She says, "It's kind of like a history of feelings rather than a history of facts. So don't expect a masterpiece theatre, educational Marie Antoinette biopic."

[Triggerhippie]

At least she's working her way slowly (judging by those pics)...


Remember how cute Pamela Anderson used to be, now think about the silico-lipo thing she became...

[Borges]

Shakespeare in Love? Amadeus? At no time in human history have dramatizations of historical events been completely accurate to the facts. Shakespeare included.

[Borges]

It makes sense...it means that the subject of the film isn't so much the events she was a part of but what she felt about her situation.

[Borges]

It's not like Old Hollywood was a model of historical veracity. Remember this white elephant?

[IronJack]

I didn't say they had to present a historical documentary. I said they were incapable of grasping the truth or of comprehending anything beyond carnality. To trivialize the French Revolution by making Marie Antoinette merely a sexual adventurer is to market "history" at the lowest common denominator.

But it also translates something esoteric into a language the Hollywoodheads can understand.

[Niuhuru]

I remember reading that neither Dunst nor Coppola had read anything about Marie Antoinette. They never studied her character or read about her life in any detail. They claim to have based it on Antonia Fraser's biography, but that was only one mere interpretation and not a very well rounded one.

[Niuhuru]

It might be. I think they will botch it. Hollywood actresses have never been ones to actually study and try to gain serious insight into the people they portray. For them it's about their demands and wants, not the realistic portrayal.

[Borges]

Focusing on invidivuals as opposed to the historical events that surround them has been a mainstay of movies at least since 'Gone with the Wind'. Jane Austen's novels never mention the Napoleonic Wars going on just around the bend.

[IronJack]

No, but War and Peace does! Enough for two.

[RobbyS]

Marie Antoinette WAS a babe: literally. She was fifteen when she married Louis, and as her portraits show was a delicious bit of Austrian strudel. Her problem wasd that poor Louis was awful in bed, just as he was awful as king.

[Borges]

Remember this?

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/772103/posts

You don't still feel the way you did back then did you? Leo is the least 'twisted' writer ever. He was the writer of pure normalcy.

[IronJack]

You don't still feel the way you did back then did you?

No, I don't. I reread Tolstoy and acquired a new appreciation of his historical analysis. As a dramatist, he leaves much to be desired, and his views of Shakespeare are ... odd. But War and Peace truly is a tour de force of historical "fiction."

[Borges]

The 'analysis' is actually what most people hate about W&P. The fiction part is just sublime.

[SirLinksalot]

In regards to the alleged LET THEM EAT CAKE remark of Marie Antoninette, here is a little historical perspective IN CONTEXT. This by National Review editor -- Jonah Goldberg

SEE HERE :

http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200402270844.asp

---

The Democrats have been pounding on the Bush administration for months about its alleged "insensitivity" to the outsourcing of jobs. Kerry and Edwards have been screeching about the White House's "policy" to outsource jobs, close factories and — no doubt coming soon — to switch honest American Girl Scout cookies for stale Chinese fortune cookies made by children shackled to conveyer belts.




Before that — and before Bush backed a half-trillion-dollar Medicare expansion — the Democrats pounded the table about Bush's "insensitivity" about the lack of healthcare and the outrageous costs of prescription drugs. Before that it was the tax cuts. I forget what came before that. But there's a unifying theme to all of these policies and criticisms, at least in the minds of liberals.

Jonathan Alter of Newsweek calls it "let-them-eat-cake economics," a phrase that does seem to capture in one neat liberal cliché the belief that Republicans don't understand the average guy's plight.

In fact, last summer the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee issued a news release titled, "DeLay: Qu'ils mangent de la brioche," when Tom Delay came out against some "pro-child" tax credit. That gibberish in the preceding sentence is the actual line that Marie Antoinette was supposed to have uttered when she heard the peasants were starving because there was no bread.

There's only one problem with this line of attack. Everything — and I mean everything — about it is wrong.

Let's start from the top. First, "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" doesn't mean, "Let them eat cake." It means, "Let them eat some fancy egg-based bread" — i.e. a brioche. Second, Marie Antoinette never said it. The story comes from Rousseau's Confessions and, according to historians, he couldn't have been talking about Marie Antoinette, because she was only 10 years old when the book was written and still living in Austria. Some believe that perhaps Marie Therese, another queen, had said, "Let them eat brioche," 100 years before the French Revolution.

Other historians think Rousseau just made it all up. Whatever.

What's far more bogus is the moral behind the story. You see, back then France had a law on the books that required bakeries to sell expensive breads — including brioche — at the same price as cheap bread if the baker ran out of cheap bread. So, saying, "Let them eat brioche" is actually pretty rational. It's like saying, "Let them enforce minimum wage laws" or "the government should do something about those profiteering bakers who aren't selling their fancy bread at an affordable price!"

And here is where we get to the heart of things. The rule about selling expensive bread at a loss if necessary to feed the poor was just one of a whole tangle of crazy regulations established by bleeding-heart French nobles to do "right" by the lower classes. From medieval times until the 1980s, the price of a baguette had been fixed to a specific formula. And, even today, bread prices, baking techniques and bread sizes are regulated in minute detail in France.

The intention behind these laws was largely goody-goody, nice-nice. In fact, Marie Antoinette was something of a limousine liberal (gilded carriage liberal?) who offended her fellow nobles by disdaining royal excess.

The problem was that since French bakers were denied the ability to make cheap bread at a profit, and forced to sell expensive bread at a loss, they did the only rational thing possible: They made very little bread at all. That's how we got bread riots and maybe even the French Revolution.

Today, the loudest voices in the Democratic party want to regulate the economy based upon what's nice, not on what works. Yes, it would be nice if economic realities didn't make it necessary for some jobs to be sent overseas, and, sure, it'd be sweetness and light if life-saving drugs could cost a penny.

But simply saying you're going to "stop" companies from outsourcing a fraction of their labor or that you're going to "make" drugs supercheap doesn't cut it. There's no way to do those things without inviting other, usually worse, problems.

The moment you make a drug company sell its products at a loss is the moment that company stops making that product at all. If you tell a firm it can't hire a few people in India and lay off a few here to stay competitive you're saying you want that company to lose money.

That's fine if you want the government to subsidize industry and force prices to go up for consumers or something else along those lines. But history tell us that it's not good for the poor or anybody else in the long run.

The slander behind the whole doctrine of "let-them-eat-cake economics" is that, aside from distorting history, it distorts the motives of those who support the free market, which just happens to be the greatest boon to poor people in the history of the planet. Meanwhile it's the liberals who practice "let-them-eat-cake economics." They just don't know enough of the facts to realize it.

[Sloth]

Actress Kirsten Dunst has come under fire from historians

Shouldn't they be aiming at the writers / director / producer / etc.? Actors are just people whose only job skill is to read what other people tell them.

[IronJack]

The fiction part is just sublime.

The fiction part is tedious, pedantic, and two-dimensional. The only thing that gives it any depth at all is the backdrop against which it plays out. The characters are little more than cliches representing respective classes of Russo-European society at the time. I read it for the history, and for Tolstoy's somewhat bizarre philosophy of historical development. Oddly enough, it works, although how broadly I can't say. But his insistence that the times are NOT the product of great men, and that great men DO NOT arise from the times, is, to say the least, controversial.

[Hildy]

The French government let Coppolla use everything, Versailles...they had carte blanche...and look what they did. Sophia Coppola is tbe most overrated filmmaker of my generation, hands down.

[Borges]

That's the exact opposite of what everyone else who has ever lived thinks about Tolstoy. :-)

What he excelled at was depicting human beings in their everyday existence. He's argueably the greatest imaginative writer since Shakespeare. He's the standard by which all realist writers are judged. What they say about him is that after a while it doesn't seem like the writer is there and it's just life writing itself. Dostoevsky on the other hand fits your description. The charactes are generally hysterics who mouth his philosphical arguments.

[dfwgator]

Heck she even single-handedly ruined Godfather III with her alleged acting.

[Borges]

She has geniune a lyrical touch. Her three feature films are all concerned with lonely young women who want to escape their stifling surroundings. She should film Madame Bovary.