Marie Antoinette

A bit of a theme seems to be emerging here, as I, like L, went to see a film about a Queen recently. This one was about a rather more resplendent and tragic figure, Marie-Antoinette. I have been obsessed by Marie-Antoinette ever since I did my talk on her in my 'A' level French oral and have always thought her a particularly sad figure, someone who was totally overwhelmed by events entirely beyond her control: married off to a prince she did not know aged 15, feted by the world, then brutally thrown out of her gilded cage, sent to the Conciergerie, forced to watch her son being turned into alcoholic and accused of incest, then finally beheaded. She was always nothing more than a cipher - either for the dynastic ambitions of the Habsburgs, or the revolutionary enthusiasms of the infant French Republic.
I, like L, am a staunch anti-monarchist, and for the dual reasons that L outlined: it naturalises class privilege, and places unfair burdens on normal human beings. However, watching Marie-Antoinette, I reflect again upon that fascinating woman and the way in which her life path was entirely dictated by historical circumstance. And maybe this is the function the royal family serve; to remind us all that really, we are all dictated to by historical circumstance. Perhaps really my life is as determined by my birth and the socio-historico-political habitus in which I live as Marie Antoinette's. Maybe we are all really victims of fate and the idea we influence our destiny is a necessary illusion. The film, while showcasing the decadence, and gorgeous to look at, finishes early, on the (what was to be unsuccesful) flight to Verdun. Sofia Coppola, so good at investigating the vagaries and insecurity of post-adolescent women, doesn't send her heroine to the guillotine. The film then shies away from its ultimate message, that its throughly modern Marie-Antoinette couldn't have her cake and eat it, not in the end. And neither can we.