“Teen Queen,” by Kennedy Fraser, was originally published in the September 2006 issue of Vogue.
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Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette, covering the nineteen years that fabulous and tragic woman spent at Versailles, created a sensation when it opened earlier this year in France. It was filmed largely on location in the palace, with unswerving support from the directors of the museum. For the two leading actors—Kirsten Dunst as the young queen and Coppola’s cousin Jason Schwartzman as King Louis XVI—it was a transformative experience to walk in rustling silk and tapping heels through halls filled with ghosts. For Dunst, exquisitely but unstuffily costumed by Milena Canonero (who deserves an Oscar for this work), it was a very sensual role. “You breathe differently in those dresses; you move in a special way,” Dunst says. To prepare herself, on the night a scaled-down crew was filming her in the emotionally charged balcony scene, she walked alone through the palace in the dark. “I could look in those mirrors,” she says. “Be still in myself. Feel my place in that house.”
It is Coppola’s third full-length film, after The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation. With a $40 million budget, it is by far her most ambitious project. She was aware that her subject is controversial—that people, especially in France, either see the queen as a saint and martyr or really, really hate her. But Coppola forgot about all that and brought her own Marie Antoinette to life. In her film, history is seen from a very feminine young woman’s point of view. In the director’s mind it forms a trilogy with the previous two films, exploring the theme of young women discovering who they are. The queen’s love of fashion particularly interested her. “You’re considered superficial and silly if you’re interested in fashion,” Coppola says. “But I think you can be substantial and still be interested in frivolity. The girl in Lost in Translation is just about to figure out a way of finding herself, but she hasn’t yet. In this film she makes the next step. I feel that Marie Antoinette is a very creative person.”
In 1770, the fourteen-year-old Archduchess Marie Antoinette left her home in Austria and traveled to meet her fifteen-year-old fiancé, the dauphin, heir to the throne of France. She was an attractive little thing, with blonde hair, blue eyes, a fine pale skin, and the pouting Hapsburg-family lower lip. She was the fifteenth child of a formidable mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, who led her huge empire so efficiently that she went on reading state papers while she was giving birth. At the last minute it had been discovered that the future bride (who liked dancing and playing with children and dolls) could barely read and write. Her mother arranged for a crash education and a makeover, including cosmetic dentistry, a less provincial hairdo, and a complete new wardrobe of French-style clothes. Then the girl rolled through the forest in a special gilded coach with gold roses (symbol of the Hapsburgs) and lilies (symbol of the Bourbons) nodding in a topknot on the roof. Behind the huge glass windows she was like a jewel in a padded case. From now on, her mother had warned her, all eyes would be upon her, and she should do what she was told. Maria Theresa had anxious premonitions; her girl was lively and affectionate in nature but had the attention span of a flea.
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