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.

This event is part of ArtsThursdays, a university-wide initiative supported by Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA).