Yes, pastels are pretty. The band, too.

Not like it’s actually a surprise to anyone, but I really love The Virgin Suicides. At least, I really love the book. I also liked the movie, which captured the strange, eerie nostalgia and adolescent awkwardness that Eugenides writes so well. I thought Sofia Coppola did a fantastic job of transferring the book from page to screen. However, in seeing Marie Antoinette last night, I was fairly disappointed. In Virgin Suicides, part of the problem that the collective narrators are looking to solve is the actual character and personality of the Lisbon sisters. They are purposefully blank, charming, romantic, strange. They are enigmas. But when the same techniques are used for Marie Antoinette’s character in the film, we are left without any substance. There are gorgeous gowns and lovely moments, fantastically shot scenes dripping with sugar and sunlight. But the character herself is a terrified and coy, virginal but in a horrible Hollywood way. She is two dimensional, uninteresting but beautiful. The best moments of the movie are the awkward and angsty ones between Louis and Marie Antoinette, as they exchange badly scripted, double-entendre ridden dialogue in the midst of the pomp of Versailles (seriously, how could they be expected to consummate when the entire palace watches them enter their marriage bed?). As they sit in their beautiful clothes in their gorgeous palace, as they eat food that matches the decorations in both hue and overindulgence, the characters fail to overcome the fussiness of their circumstances in anyway. I found myself happy that all of the nobles would lose their prissy, petty heads. I completely understand why French people hated them movie. All the French in the film are either prudes or sluts, gossips or clueless, incredibly staunch or frustratingly fickle. There is no definition in the movie. It is terribly, terribly beautiful, but collapses itself in its self-consciousness and lack of actual character. Where Virgin Suicides acknowledged its romanticizing and failure to grasp the characters (that was sort of the point), here Coppola indulges everything. She spent so much money on fabric and food that she couldn’t buy a script?

Also, there were a pair of pastel Converses for a split second in one of the montages of Marie Antoinette’s excesses (set to “I want candy”). I think I’m not alone in really really hating that moment.