Marie Antoinette

I saw a sneak preview of Marie Antoinette in Santa Monica last night. Sofia Coppola was supposed to be there, but was a no show. The film was disappointing, given that I really liked Lost in Translation. It had no discernible plot, the characters had little psychological depth, and the resulting unmotivated sequence of events (and conspicuous montages) was listless and boring (save a few scenes). In the spirit of charity one wonders whether these ostensible dramatic flaws could possibly be read as virtues - e.g. as successfully capturing the listlessness, boredom, purposelessness, and inanity of life in the court -- but that doesn't cohere with the purported revisionary take on Marie Antoinette. We could go meta and say something like: our inability to empathize with Marie Antoinette in this film, despite her evident suffering, because of the apparent absence of psychological depth, the inanity of her life, her excesses, her obliviousness to the needs of others (which is preserved in the film), reflects, say, the inability of the rest of the world to empathize with the United States. This would make the film's failure to portray Marie with empathy subversive, implying that the U.S. cannot portrayed empathetically. I imagine that this film is supposed to be an allegory (I haven't read anything from Coppola, though), but given the inanity of the film, it's at best an empty allegory.