14-year-old Marie Antoinette (German Emilia Schule from The Powerpuff Girls comedy) leaves his hometown of Vienna forever. There he remains with his stern and demanding mother, the Archduchess of Austria and Queen of Hungary Maria Theresa of Bohemia. The next stop is Versailles, where the girl will live with her husband, Louis-Auguste, the future King of France, Louis XVI. (Louis Cunningham, who shines in Bridgertons; he is, by the way, the great-granddaughter of Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxembourg). But the arranged marriage doesn’t go well: shy and clumsy Louis can’t even talk to his wife. At the same time, King XV. The inhabitants of Versailles, led by Louis, actively put pressure on the couple, who had to produce an heir, thereby eventually sealing the union of France and Austria.
For Canal+, Marie Antoinette is the ideological heir to the Louis XIV costume drama Versailles, a cunning export project where the French asked British Simon Mirren and David Wolstencroft to write and film in English. After three seasons at Versailles, Canal+ decided to perform the same operation with Marie Antoinette’s biography and turned to Deborah Davis, another British woman with a similar technical role.
For Davis, the series is a welcome return to the radar. He wrote the first draft of his first movie, The Favorite, in 1998, but that text (after the participation of director Yorgos Lanthimos and The Great’s writer Tony McNamara) reached the screen for another twenty years. While the screenplay involving the love triangle of the three main characters was tried to be sold and put into production, Davis did not move up the career ladder very actively and for a time wrote radio plays, for example, for BBC Radio 4. Surprisingly, it became the second item in the filmography of Marie Antoinette.
Thanks to the new show, you can finally get a sense of what Davis left in Favorite and what McNamara brought in, whose script for the pilot The Great once shot Lanthimos. At its core, Marie Antoinette is The Great, but with no discernible affinity for comedy, a classic in many ways, officially run in a feminist vein (she worked with Davis on an all-female screenwriter team). At the same time, it is interesting that “Wonderful” composed by a man seems to be more directly focused on feminism – there the evidential denial of authenticity was unleashed and World War II. It made it possible to build almost a comic from Catherine’s life. , a lively fairy tale about the origin of a superhero, the empowerment of women.
“Marie Antoinette” is more interesting to speculate about the monstrous nature of the monarchy. A group of not-so-nice people living in a breathtakingly beautiful hellhole have invented for themselves a set of absurd rules, half of the characters helplessly unwilling to follow them, as a result, a lot of noise that affects the fate of an entire state, literally at every step, that exists out of nothing. It turns out: side glances are easy, they can lead to full-fledged battles. So what’s scarier in Marie Antoinette isn’t how horribly society treats women (although that’s enough, of course), but how many tectonic decisions are made not by the brain, but by, say, the penis, with completely insane thoughts. – or by other organs that are not well suited for these purposes. However, it is reassuring that all this, of course, happened in the distant past.