In several 2006 interviews, Coppola suggests that her highly stylised interpretation was intentionally very modern in order to humanise the historical figures involved. She admitted to taking great artistic liberties with the source material, and said that the film does not focus simply on historical facts – "It is not a lesson of history. It is an interpretation documented, but carried by my desire for covering the subject differently."
Marie Antoinette received both applause and some boos during early
Cannes Film Festival press screenings, which one reviewer supposes was because some of the French journalists may have been offended that the film was not sufficiently critical of the regime's decadence. However, film critic
Roger Ebert clarified that, in actuality, only a couple of journalists had been booing during the press screening, and that the media had sensationalised the event. He stated that booing is more common in Europe, and sometimes done when someone feels that a film is "politically incorrect".
Reception in the United States Marie Antoinette received mixed-to-positive reviews from critics. The film holds an approval rating of 57% on
Rotten Tomatoes based on 218 reviews with an average rating of 6.10/10. The website's critics consensus states, "Lavish imagery and a daring soundtrack set this film apart from most period dramas; in fact, style completely takes precedence over plot and character development in Coppola's vision of the doomed queen."
Metacritic gives the film a weighted average score of 65 out of 100, based on 37 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by
CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C" on an A+ to F scale.
People magazine's movie critic, Leah Rozen, wrote in her wrap-up of Cannes that, "The absence of political context ... upset most critics of
Marie Antoinette, director Sofia Coppola's featherweight follow-up to
Lost in Translation. Her historical biopic plays like a pop video, with Kirsten Dunst as the doomed 18th century French queen acting like a teenage
flibbertigibbet intent on being the leader of the cool kids' club." Roger Ebert gave the film four stars out of four. He stated that, "every criticism I have read of this film would alter its fragile magic and reduce its romantic and tragic poignancy to the level of an instructional film. This is Sofia Coppola's third film centering on the loneliness of being female and surrounded by a world that knows how to use you but not how to value and understand you." The critic for
MSN, Dave McCoy, described it as a great satire, "I laughed, as I had been doing for the past twenty minutes. I was laughing at the satire, at Coppola's brash approach and from the pure joy that a great film can trigger."
Reception in France The film's critical reception in France was generally positive. It has an
aggregate score of 4/5 on the French cinema site
AlloCiné, based on 21 reviews from professional critics. François Vey of
Le Parisien found it to be "funny, upbeat, impertinent" and "in a word, iconoclastic". Among negative critical reviews, Jean-Luc Douin of
Le Monde described
Marie Antoinette as "
kitsch and
roc(k)oco" which "deliberately displays its
anachronisms", and additionally as a "sensory film" that was "dreamt by a
Miss California" and "orchestrated around the Du Barry or Madame de Polignac playground gossip". Alex Masson of
Score thought the film had a script "which is often forgotten to the corruption of becoming a special issue of
Vogue devoted to scenes of Versailles". An example of this combining of the actual period with modern times is a scene when Marie Antoinette and her friends enjoy a shopping spree and feast on luxurious sweets, champagne, clothing, shoes and jewellery to Bow Wow Wow's "
I Want Candy". In the magazine ''
L'Internaute'',
Évelyne Lever, a historian and authority on Marie Antoinette, described the film as "far from historical reality". She wrote that the film's characterisation of Marie Antoinette lacked historical authenticity and psychological development: "In reality she did not spend her time eating pastries and drinking champagne! [...] In the movie Marie Antoinette is the same from 15 to 33 years". She also expressed the view that "better historical films" such as
Barry Lyndon and
The Madness of King George succeeded because their directors were "steeped in the culture of the time they evoked". Coppola responded to the critics by explaining that she was interested in showing "the real human being behind the myths..." ==Box office==