Country: USA
Year: 2006
Duration: 123'
The Austrian born princess Marie Antoinette was sent off to the royal court of Versailles at 14, where she was lost in the rigid etiquette, family infighting and merciless gossip. Forced to live her life in the glare of the public spotlight and to have a baby from the wimp Louis XVI, she found her escape in the pleasures of love with a general of the French Army. But her frivolity unwittingly made her the object of scandal and a convenient scapegoat for a society on the verge of Revolution. “Marie Antoinette was a symbol of decadence. I didn’t realise to what point these people, who were called upon to govern a country, were in point of fact no more than teenagers. Daily life in the Château de Versailles is also, for these adolescents, a form of apprenticeship set in a tense, difficult environment. I wasn’t making a political movie about the French Revolution. I was doing a portrait of the character Marie Antoinette. The story is about teenagers in Versailles so I wanted it to have the energy of youth, a teenage feeling to it.” (S. Coppola)
Biography
film director
Sofia Coppola
Sofia Coppola (New York, 1971), daughter of Eleanor and Francis Ford Coppola, debuted in cinema when she was just a few months old, in the baptism scene of The Godfather (1972). In 1989 she collaborated on the screenplay of Life without Zoe, an episode of New York Stories directed by her father. One year later, Sofia played the role of Mary Corleone in The Godfather - Part III. She abandoned her acting career and graduated from the California Institute of the Arts before debuting as a director with The Virgin Suicides, presented at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs in Cannes. The following Lost in Translation (2003) won the Oscar for Best Screenplay. Marie Antoinette competed at the Festival of Cannes.
FILMOGRAFIA
Lick the Star (cm, 1998), The Virgin Suicides (Il giardino delle vergini suicide, 1999), Lost in Translation (L’amore tradotto, 2003), Marie Antoinette (id., 2006)