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| 24 May 2006 | Heads Up
Empire sees Marie Antoinette… And Borat! |
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Another day, another controversial Cannes screening – well, controversial if you're French. This morning saw the first screening of Sofia Coppola's latest, Marie Antoinette, which, based on the novel by Antonia Fraser, follows the life of the Austrian princess turned French queen who was a symbol of late 18th century decadence and lost her head come the French Revolution.
Shot with crisp elegance and featuring a superb soundtrack (including The Cure, Phoenix, New Order and Siouxie And The Banshees, whose Hong Kong Garden plays at a masque ball with excellent A Knight's Tale-style anachronicity), it showcases a great lead performance from Kirsten Dunst, whose wigs become so immense it’s a wonder her neck didn't snap. But Coppola's decision to limit the often light-hearted drama to Antoinette's mostly frivolous time in Versailles and avoid displaying much of the revolution at all didn't go down with some French critics, who clearly felt their history was being mistold.
We're guessing it was mainly this Gallic contingent who delivered the cluster of boos which resonated around the cavernous Lumiere cinema (matched, it should be pointed out, by applause), but when this response was mentioned to Coppola at the press conference afterwards, she seemed rather flustered.
"I didn't know about the boos at the screening," she said. "That's news to me." Her cast then leapt to her rescue. Marianne Faithfull (who plays Antoinette's mother) quipped that we must be talking about the Da Vinci Code screening, Kirsten Dunst chipped in with "Well I liked the movie!" and Steve Coogan, who plays Antoinette's mentor, added, "When you make something which is personal and specific, it's inevitable there will be some naysayers and it's better to have that than to have a bland, uniform kind of response to something. I've seen the film and it's consistent with all the qualities that have made her films brilliant in the past and people who love Sofia Coppola films will love this film."
Coppola also proved strangely reluctant to discuss any political undercurrents in her movie. "I don't find it's my role to make political statements," she insisted. "I think there's elements of the story of how these people [in the Versailles court] are so unaware of the world outside of them that I feel it's relevant to today, but I'm not gonna go as far as talk about that topic."
Another movie which explores that topic of people being unaware of the world around them is also the funniest movie Empire's seen so far this year. We were lucky enough to be invited to a special early screening of Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat movie, in which his clueless Kazakhstani TV presenter travels from New York to LA in order to learn from his American encounters – and seek access to Pamela Anderson's "vagin".
Structured as a series of stunts in which unwitting real-life Yanks reveal their gullibility and prejudices via Borat's ludicrous and often unbelievably offensive (in a good, ironic way) statements, it's far truer to the character's smallscreen origins than Ali G In Da House. And it made Empire laugh so much we literally had an asthma attack. In fact, it was so funny, even Southland Tales casualty The Rock, another invitee, was hooting away a few rows in front of us. Not sure it's going to go down too well in Kazakhstan, though…
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