"Marie Antoinette" at the New York Film Festival

Much has been made of this movie, which was booed at Cannes but has since received pretty positive reviews from American critics. It's sweet, as sweet as the bon bons Marie chomps throughout her biopic, and the deliberately anachronistic music (from the 1980s, including the annoying "I Want Candy," which I can't seem to get out of my head) and fashion (a shot of lilac hightops) definitely works. It's beautiful too, one montage following another such that the movie becomes a series of lush shots rather than an acute character study. But that's OK, because Marie Antoinette's having her moment, 213 years after her death; there's plenty of academic and revisionist stuff being published right now that serves as a complement to Coppola's movie.

"Let them eat cake," Marie Antoinette famously did not say, according to the movie, even as Marie and her lady consorts eat cake after cake. The fun for us is in the watching.