Mein Gott was this movie slow. It was a long, languid sort of film with lots of different mood shots and not much movement in the plot. We have endless shots of Dunst running down the hall like a robot in a corset or waking up surrounded by French courtiers. We see her change her clothes over and over and basically ends up looking bored some of the time and then frustrated at others. We also get a scene after scene of her walking slowly in the grass, drinking with her other royal relatives, trying to get the King to sleep with her, etc.
We do get a sense though that the French Court of Louis XVI was totally out of the loop when it came to world events. We get a little smattering of the American Revolution and a barest hint of the buildup to the French Revolution. I guess this was intentional but it left the movie in a sort of limbo where we were forced to care about this poor Austrian girl surrounded by opulence who's only goal in life was the have a child with uber-dork Louis XVI.
It was basically a coming of age teen drama set in Pre-Revolutionary France with a rock beat. Kind of like The OC with beautiful dresses, gilded bedrooms, and real princesses. Also everyone seemed to have an American accent and only the child playing her daughter actually saying anything in French. It could have been filmed in Santa Barbara or South Beach for all we know.
One thing that was positive about the movie was the costumes and sets. They were 100% spot on from all of the stuff that I have read about the period. The food arrangement was also top notch with lots of different little French cakes and weird cooked pheasants or meat towers and things. It's kind of sad to say that a movie is so slow that you are noticing things like the cakes and the costumes more then the plot.
In my book it seemed like I was waiting for the payoff pitch for the entire movie. I thought they would show her finally going to the guillotine as the picture of composure; stoic to the very end. It would have been the perfect bookend to the movie and would be a nice play off of the languidness of the earlier parts of the film. All of the chaos of the Revolution and the uncertainty of her fate (to people that haven't studied history) would have really have given nice motion to the end of the movie.
It would have been exciting to see the confinement in the Tuileries with everyone scared, stoic, crying, etc. Then they could have had the escape attempt with lots of suspense about whether they would be caught etc. These scenes would have made for a great climax and finale of the movie. Instead we have some stuff about her affair with some Swedish dude and the climax turns out to be when she gives birth to the new Dauphin. The last scene is her saying goodbye to the other princesses and then her saying goodbye to good old Versailles one last time.
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