Making Marie Antoinette
Marie Antoinette
The repeat screening of Marie Antoinette features the new, behind-the-scenes documentary shot by Coppola’s mother, Eleanor Coppola, who is well known for her revelatory footage of Francis Ford Coppola’s notoriously stormy production of Apocalypse Now. In honor of her mother and twenty-years of Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola revisited the eighty hours of footage and edited it into this entertaining, enlightening disclosure.
PROGRAM
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Making Marie Antoinette
Directed by Eleanor Coppola.
Italy/US, 2026, DCP, color, 86 min.
DCP source: MUBI
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Marie Antoinette
Directed by Sophia Coppola.
With Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Judy Davis .
US/France/Japan, 2006, 35mm, color, 123 min.
Print source: HFA
A fourteen-year-old girl leaves her home, her country and her puppy behind to marry a man she has never met. Twenty years later, she is the most despised woman in France. Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette explores the rigid social structure and wild excesses of Versailles on the eve of the French Revolution. The film’s setting, shot on location, is extravagant, immense and overwhelming. The characters often seem to be swallowed up by the very architecture and landscape over which they rule. Casting actors known for comedy—Steve Coogan, Rose Byrne, Jason Schwartzman—highlights the understated humor running through a film that is fully aware of aristocratic absurdity without ever quite making it a punchline.
Marie Antoinette has been polarizing since its premiere, but later waves of critical attention have pointed to its tender and nuanced portrait of a young woman enmired in a situation larger than herself as a work of feminist art, and the film’s deceptively lighthearted, playful sensibility, which deliberately deploys anachronism as a tool, has had a crucial impact on the period dramas made since.
Part of film series
Upcoming screenings from this program
Marie Antoinette
Making Marie Antoinette / Marie Antoinette
