Her chaperone, the Comtesse de Noailles, is played by Judy Davis, who seems to have had extra tendons added to her neck for the role. The comtesse's job is to instruct Marie in French protocol, and she is only one of several figures who shuffle into the princess's line of sight every now and then to offer scolding, advice and instruction. Others include Count Mercy D'Argenteau (Steve Coogan) and Joseph of Austria (Danny Huston), Marie's beloved older brother, who also counsels her husband on some delicate matters of conjugal duty, about which the young man seems to have no clue.
The poor would-be king is in some ways even more lost than his bride, who has a spark of mischief and an extravagant sense of style. Louis is overshadowed by his grandfather, Louis XV (Rip Torn), a rambunctious old goat whose fleshly appetites seem not to have been passed down to his heir.
Schwartzman mumbles and bumbles, looking younger and softer than he has in previous films, and quietly showing the pathos of this hapless boy's situation. He is happiest out hunting with his pals or tinkering with locks, and he quite literally does not know what to do with the girl that fate has tossed into his bed. The royal marriage is unconsummated for seven years, and the absence of new blood in the royal line becomes grist for gossip and a potential political crisis.
Molly Shannon and Shirley Henderson are two of the principal mean girls of Versailles, and their chosen scapegoat is the elder Louis' mistress, Madame du Barry (Asia Argento), who is also Marie's rival for influence at court. The mingling of private matters with affairs of state is a hallmark of this kind of monarchy, and in Coppola's hands the analogies to modern celebrity culture are simultaneously clear and subtle. Marie's life is one of obscene entitlement, but it is also heavily constrained, and the story the film tells is of her efforts to accommodate her headstrong, spirited individualism to the strictures of her role as queen.
She is profligate and self-indulgent, yes, impetuously ordering up shoes, parties and impromptu trips to Paris. She breaks with tradition by applauding at the opera, and then appears onstage herself. She takes a lover - a dashing Swedish nobleman - and turns Petit Trianon, a royal retreat that was a gift from her husband, into a kind of Versailles VIP room, where she drinks, gardens, reads Rousseau and plays shepherdess. These activities have often been mocked - and were the source of scandal and outrage in the years before the revolution - but through Coppola's eyes they are poignant as well as a bit silly.
And the film's visual extravagance somehow conveys its heroine's loneliness as well as the sheer fun of aristocratic life. We know how this story ends, and Coppola refrains from showing us the violent particulars, or from sentimentalizing her heroine's fate, preferring to conclude on a quiet, restrained note that registers the loss of Marie's world as touchingly as the rest of the film has acknowledged her folly, her confusion and her humanity.
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