Marie Antoinette (2006 film)

Marie Antoinette is a 2006 biographical film, written and directed by Sofia Coppola. It is very loosely based on the life of the Queen consort in the years leading up to the French Revolution. It won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design. It was released in the United States on October 20, 2006, by Columbia Pictures.

Plot

Fourteen-year-old Maria Antonia Josepha Joanna (Kirsten Dunst) is the beautiful, charming, but naïve, youngest daughter of Austrian empress Maria Theresa (Marianne Faithfull). In 1768, she is selected by her mother to marry her second cousin, the Dauphin of France, Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), thereby sealing an alliance between the two rival countries.

Marie Antoinette travels to France, relinquishing all connections with her home country, and meets Louis XV (Rip Torn) and her future husband, the Dauphin. The two are married shortly thereafter. Toasts are drunk to their happy marriage and they are encouraged to produce an heir as soon as possible, but the next day it is reported that 'nothing happened' on their wedding night.

As time passes, Marie Antoinette, who is never without an unwanted entourage of servants and noblewomen, begins to find life at the court of Versailles stifling. The courtiers disdain Marie Antoinette as a foreigner – an Austrian, no less – and consistently blame her for not having produced an heir.

The French court is rife with gossip, and Marie Antoinette consistently ruffles feathers by defying its...
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