Marie Antoinette is a 2006 film written and directed by Sofia Coppola about the life of Marie Antoinette. The film is loosely based on the historical biography Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Lady Antonia Fraser, and ends with the fall of Versailles.

It is the first full-length biopic of Queen Marie Antoinette to be made in the English language since the 1938 Oscar-nominated Hollywood film starring Norma Shearer and Tyrone Power.

Tagline: Let them eat cake.

Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst), a naive, young Archduchess of Austria comes to the Palace of Versailles, to marry the Dauphin of France (Jason Schwartzman). She is immediately immersed in conspiracy and scandal, including a minor conflict with the King Louis XV's (Rip Torn) mistress, Madame du Barry (Asia Argento). Marie Antoinette rebels against the structured and socially isolating atmosphere of Versailles and at the death of the King Louis XV, becomes France's leading fashion icon. The film touches upon Marie's alleged affair with Count Axel von Fersen (Jamie Dornan) as well as the difficulties with Louis XVI to create an heir, but these are presented in a sympathetic manner. It ends on the day the palace is attacked and the royal family are taken back to Paris to face house arrest and, four years later, execution.

The production crew was given unprecedented access to the Palace of Versailles, where the real Marie Antoinette lived from the time of her marriage in 1770 until the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. The movie takes the same sympathetic view of Marie Antoinette's life as was presented in Fraser's biography. An earlier biography of the French queen, written by the Austrian author Stefan Zweig in 1933, was rejected by Coppola for inspiration because she believed it was too hostile and unsympathetic to Marie Antoinette's youth and inexperience.

Although eyebrows were raised at the casting of young American actress Kirsten Dunst in the title role, previously, Dunst has won praise for portraying difficult characters, such as a suicidal suburban teen in her first Coppola collaboration, The Virgin Suicides (1999), the vampire-child Claudia in Interview with the Vampire (1994) and Marion Davies in The Cat's Meow (2001). In a recent interview, Dunst revealed that she felt a powerful sense of empathy with Marie Antoinette—who was exploited by the ambitious courtiers, who sought to use her position for their own advantage.

The film's soundtrack contains songs by 1980s New Wave and post-punk bands such as New Order ("Ceremony", "Age of Consent"), The Cure ("All Cats Are Grey", "Plainsong") and Bow Wow Wow ("Fools Rush In") as well as newer material by The Strokes and electronic acts like Aphex Twin.

This is unconventional and may prove controversial (as with the unusual technique of the actors using their natural accents rather than French), as historical films are rarely scored with noticeably contemporary music.

In several 2006 interviews, Sofia Coppola suggests that her highly stylized interpretation is very modern in order to humanize the historical figures involved. She has taken great artistic liberties with the source material and 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.” . Perhaps because of this unusual approach, the film was booed at early screenings in Cannes, and received chilly reviews from the French press. At the opposite extreme of opinion, British historian Lady Antonia Fraser, author of the acclaimed bestselling biography which the film is loosely based upon, proclaimed that the film was "beautiful" in an interview with The Times.

Some scenes, however, utilize Baroque music, principally composed by Jean-Philippe Rameau. Three of his pieces are in the film:

Les Indes Galantes - "1st Menuet Pour Les Guirries et les Amazones, 2nd Menuet"
Performed by William Christie & Les Arts Florissants
Courtesy of Harmonia Mundi France (P) 1991
Castor & Pollux - "Tristes apprêts, pâles flambeaux""
Performed by Agnès Mellon (soporano) with William Christie & Les Arts Florissants
Courtesy of Harmonia Mundi France (P) 1993
Platée - "Aux languets d'Apollon"
Performed by Carolyn Sampson (soprano) with Jeffrey Skidmore & Ex Cathedra
Courtesy of Hyperion Records, Ltd.
"Les Barricades Mystérieuses", composed by François Couperin, and two numbers from Aphex Twin's drukqs album, "Jynweythek Ylow" and "Avril 14th", are also featured.


An early trailer for the film was unusual in that it lacked dialogue, voiceover or ambient sound it included the song "Age of Consent" by New Order. Songs featured for later trailers were the Gang of Four song "Natural's Not In It", "Ceremony" by New Order and "What Ever Happened?" by The Strokes. Subsequent trailers are more conventional and have included dialogue.

In early reviews the film's loose adherence to the facts and offbeat style has already divided critics. Roger Ebert in his Cannes Log on his website, explained, "But now let’s step back and be fair. Yes, there was booing. But I was present at the screening and would guess not more than five people, maybe 10, booed. Many others applauded. Booing is always shocking to North American critics; I am not sure I have heard booing more than once or twice in all my years at the Toronto, Sundance, Telluride, Chicago, Montreal or New York festivals. In Europe, they boo all the time, sometimes because they think a film is bad, sometimes because it is (according to them) politically incorrect."

Roger Ebert gave the movie a rating of four stars (out of a possible four) in his Chicago Sun-Times column.

People's movie critic, Leah Rozen, wrote in her wrap up of the Cannes Film Festival that, "The absence of political context, however, 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."

The film debuted at #6 in the Dutch Boxoffice top ten, grossing over € 35,448 in that week (June 8 - June 14, 2006). In total, the film has grossed over € 183,562 in the Netherlands.

In the USA, the film opened with $5,361,050 in just 859 theaters, with a strong $6,000 per theater.

At the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, Marie-Antoinette was entry for Official Selection of Golden Palm and won the Cinema Prize of the French National Education System.