A Look Back at the Jewelry in ‘Marie Antoinette’
Sofia Coppola's lavish production featured $4 million worth of vintage diamonds
For the last couple of days, Sofia Coppola has been at the Venice Film Festival to promote her first documentary, Marc by Sofia, which centers on the making of Marc Jacobs's Spring '24 collection and his creative process. Photos of the twosome sent my mind reeling back to the early 2000s, when they were often seen together. Because it’s how my brain works, it also made me think about how she has worn jewelry from then until now.
While I polish off a Jewelry Iconoclast column on the stylish director for Sunday, I decided to post this piece from The Adventurine Archives about the vintage jewelry in Marie Antoinette (2006). Sofia talked about it on a panel in Venice.
Her description of wanting the sets and costumes to make the audience feel as if the characters were living now, as opposed to looking back at a dusty history, reminded me of how some ridiculous critics dismissed her historical riffs as mistakes.
Read on for my jewelry movie review, which was originally published on The Adventurine in 2016 to celebrate the film's 10th anniversary.
Beautiful palaces, adorable puppies and precious jewels galore are part of what make Marie Antoinette, a dreamy modern classic. However, the depiction of life at Versailles in Sofia Coppola’s film, that premiered in theaters on October 20, 2006, is not a literal retelling of facts as some shortsighted reviewers felt compelled to disparagingly point out at the time.
I mean obviously. It begins with Gang of Four’s hit “Natural’s Not In It” and titles in shocking pink and black designed by Peter Miles to look like a post-punk album cover.
If the music and titles were not big enough clues that this was a riff on yesteryear, the sort of blind casting of actors from any number of nations playing French parts without trying to imitate an accent should have let the critics know Coppola was using the historic setting as a metaphor.
The young queen, Louis XV and Louis XVI are all played by Americans—Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman and Rip Torn. English, Australian and Italian actors fill other key roles.
To keep the audience on its toes, there is some casting tangentially connected to the facts of the story.
Marianne Faithful, whose mother was an Austro-Hungarian baroness, plays Marie Antoinette’s mother Maria Theresa, the Austrian archduchess and Holy Roman Empress of the Habsburg Dynasty.
Jewelry designer Victoire de Castellane who is a descendant of French aristocracy was among the extras. Then there are the locations. Most of the film was shot at Versailles where the action, of course, actually took place.
The mix makes the movie feel as modern as it does a period piece. A link to contemporary decadence can easily be made in the party scenes, shopping montage and a moment with the court hair dresser.
The movie does go deeper emotionally, as Roger Ebert eloquently wrote, “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.”
It’s a film with layers, but to get back to this post’s raison d’etre—the jewelry is divine.
