Marvelous Marie

Yeah, Blogger has finally let me upload a picture to the site. Phew! That's a relief. I thought I'd never get to that again.

Well, last night was my birthday and I went out with my lovely friends to SAPA for $5 happy hour. Unfortunately they did not have my favorite cornmeal crusted oysters, although they did have oysters on the half-shell which I love. One of my good friends brought me a dozen of the most gorgeous roses, and a particularly lovely set of earrings and a necklace, which I promptly put on.

Then three of us went to see Marie Antoinette since it was also her birthday yesterday. Can I just say what a sumptously lovely film it was? Not to mention that Sophia Coppola managed to get the French government to actually let her film at Versailles. Ooh la la! My head was filled with visions of chocolates and macarons, not to mention escargot and lots of French champagne.

When I was in London, my friend Chip and I cracked open a bottle of Perrier-Jouet Rose, a lovely pink champagne which was excellent. I adore pink champagne. When we were walking down what Chip likes to call Old Condom Street (Old Compton Street), we saw mini-bottles of Moet and Chandon Rose. Sigh, I miss London.

I came home to find a birthday card from my former in-laws which was very sweet of them. I had hoped that Fun Guy might at least call me for my birthday or relay a message through our mutual friend birthday wishes (he knew it was my birthday) but it was not to be. When am I ever going to stop hoping that people are really good at heart?

Anywhoo, back to the film, the only quibble that I have with the film was the lack of characterization. Some things were glossed over that I thought were particularly important like the reason the Dauphin couldn't consummate the marriage. He had a medical condition that required surgery. Also her affair with Axel Fersen was just seen in a few brief scenes, in fact I dont' think the guy had any actual lines. One minute she's meeting him, the next they're having sex.

The one thing that she did get right was the stultifying amout of protocol that went on in the Royal Court from dusk to dawn. And the gossiping, although there could have been more made of that as well. The Affair of the Necklace wasn't really mentioned, nor the way the French women at court treated her as an interloper because she was Austrian, although her father was the Duke of Lorraine.

The whole Madame duBarry sequence didn't ring true to me either. I would have liked to have seen the women that she hung around with encouraging her more to vicious to the King's mistress. I really liked Kirsten Dunst, and she was certainly naive enough in the early scenes but again it didn't go far enough. Marie Antoinette was only 14 when she was married off to the Dauphin. She was torn away from everything that she knew and loved, all her women were taken away, not to mention her dog (very nice scene by the way when this happened). I would have liked to have seen more homesickness.

So I give the movie a B+ instead of an A. The worst moment of the evening was when I lost one of the earrings that I'd just been given and we couldn't find it in the movie theater. That put a huge damper on the evening.

Thanks for reading!

EKM