REVIEWS

This is one of the more unexpected films that was still on my watchlist, as someone who once dressed as Marie Antoinette for Halloween and was, at one time, a teenage girl. It feels like I should have been born having seen Marie Antoinette.

Painting this woman in a sympathetic light is, necessarily, complicated. Perhaps counter-revolutionary. But Sofia Coppola makes Antoinette sympathetic not by denying her privilege or demonizing the Revolution, but by trapping the audience inside the same noble, adolescent myopia that prevents her from seeing history barreling directly at her.

Marie Antoinette is far removed from the class struggle bubbling in France, but it's ridiculous to assume that was an oversight on Coppola's part. It's a choice that does make sense, even if it resulted in pacing issues that I couldn't quite reconcile. We're meant to understand Antoinette and Louis as naive and childlike, and it's not hard to believe that they were, in historical fact. They have no real understanding of the world and no way to ascertain it, and Marie Antoinette traps the audience in Versailles with them.

Besides, the system of monarchy also failed and exploited Antoinette, even if the consequences of that failure and exploitation were far less dire for her than it was for the proletariat starving outside the walls of Versailles. I mean, this film doesn't encourage me to envy Antoinette's position, even with all the indulgence and (seemingly) boundless resources at her disposal. Antoinette still has the weighty birthright of being a pawn in a political game, even if she also has the power, resources, and ignorance to indulge every pubescent whim she desires. And you know that those indulgences will be paid for later.

Marie Antoinette hinges on dramatic irony, that the audience is aware of something the characters in the film are not. Our own knowledge only underscores the naivety of the young monarchs, but it also allows for the scope of the film to be utterly rapt in Antoinette's subjectivity. The audience doesn't need to see the starving masses to feel uncomfortable with the excesses of Versailles. We don't need to see the guillotine to know that a blade is dangling over Marie Antoinette's throat. We already know.

In an age of dialogue-laden exposition and plotting, it's important to point out when a film uses the strengths of the medium to tell its story. Marie Antoinette does. The anachronisms are maybe the most enduring and polarizing aspects of this film, but they were wielded with purpose. We feel the youth and naivety of Antoinette not because we're told, but because of the pastel visuals, the errant pair of Converse, The Strokes in the soundtrack. Every room in Versailles is full of people, full of stuff, full of fuss. We feel what Antoinette feels, utterly isolated and never alone.

After seeing this, I feel like a dunce sitting down at my desk with a glass of cabernet to stare into the middle distance, ponder, and type my thoughts for the internet like a tool. I imagine Jane Schoenbrun laughing in my face. It's just flesh and fluids, you dork!

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a movie that was made for movie nerds, but that's as superficial as saying that I Saw the TV Glow is for people who were in a fandom for a television series, or We're All Going to the World's Fair is for the generation that grew up online. Those things may be utterly true, even a prerequisite to understanding those films, but it's not the whole truth.

This is about Kris (Hannah Einbinder), a promising young filmmaker who's been hired to reboot Camp Miasma, a classic (but tired) slasher franchise that she loved growing up. Kris spends time with the reclusive woman who played the final girl in the first film, Billy (Gillian Anderson), and tries to convince her to return to the screen in her reboot.

I was pleasantly surprised by how joyous this film was, considering how bleak the filmmaker's other work is. This is a celebration of queerness, both in the sexual sense and in the eccentric sense. It's a celebration of the films that made us, even if they're schlocky and problematic. What a pleasure, to level a critique at something I love without feeling the need to burn it to the ground! It's a celebration of embodiment, how precious it is to feel corporeal lately, even if it feels dangerous.

On that note, I need to do something with my body instead of writing about my thoughts about a movie. It's good. You should see it.