Marie Antoinette: Queen of Versailles
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DVD Cover Information
Artist: Artist Not ProvidedDVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 58 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-09-19
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Delta
Movie Reviews of Marie Antoinette: Queen of Versailles
Movie Review: Compared to Coppola's Film
Summary: 3 Stars
This must have been designed to be viewed in a high school history class. The work's point is that Marie Antoinette was at the wrong place at the wrong time. French royalty had been opulent since the Sun King's reign and by the 1790s, they just couldn't afford that anymore. It states that she did tone down her spending as she became a mother and matured. It brings up a point that had she lived as long as Queens Elizabeth and Victoria, then maybe she would have had the time to be inspiring as they were.
Now if you're like me, you got an interest in seeing this because you just saw S. Coppola's "Marie Antoinette." So let me list some of the ways the work differed.
So many biographical documentaries tone down the bisexuality or homosexuality of their subjects. I recently saw a work on Greta Garbo that said she was only "speculatively" lesbian, however, other sources list her as clearly having several lesbian relationships. Many works on Langston Hughes or George Washington Carver just say "they never married" and don't dig deeper. Whereas Coppola never touched the rumors of Marie's having lesbian relations, this work emphasized that the French working-class gossiped about that rumor often. In fact, this work is rare in that it mentions a woman who spreads such gossip saying she herself got down with Marie. This work never says Marie and Captain Fersen had an extramarital relationship. It's rare, very rare, for a work to emphasize a famous person's homosexuality over her or his heterosexuality.
In addition to the sexuality dynamic, gender was different here as well. In Coppola's film, Marie bows to a crowd of working-class women and men and the crowd's response is not really captured. This documentary, said, the crowd was composed of biological women and cross-dressed men. After Marie bowed, they chanted "Vive la reine!"
This work shows Marie painted in hats more. Coppola focused on wigs and I wonder if she didn't want hats casting shadows on Kirsten Dunst's face. Coppola features one of Marie's children dying in infancy, but this work says two died at that age. This work says Louis XVI was beheaded before Marie; I would have assumed they were beheaded close to the same time. This work emphasizes her waste more. In Coppola's movie, Marie seems to spend money on frivolity because she could and that no one told her the wiser.
The narrator had terrible French pronunciation of which he should be truly ashamed. In both film and documentary, Marie is shown writing to her birth family in English, when surely she would have written in a German dialect. It's emphasized that both French and German royalty had many members that died of diseases for which we now have cures. It didn't seem that their class status protected their health in the way that health and wealth are tied together now.
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