The Teen Queen - Kristen Dunst

by Kennedy Fraser | photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Vogue magazine

Marie Antoinette —played by Kirsten Dunst in Sofia Coppola's stunning  film (2006)—used her distinctive personal style to defy the rigid etiquette and scheming courtiers of Versailles. Kennedy Fraser looks at the high-spirited life and tragic fate of the young royal.

 
Sofia Coppola's film Marie Antoinette, covering the nineteen years that fabulous and tragic woman spent at Versailles, created a sensation when it opened earlier this year in France. It was filmed largely on location in the palace, with unswerving support from the directors of the museum. For the two leading actors—Kirsten Dunst as the young queen and Coppola's cousin Jason Schwartzman as King Louis XVI—it was a transformative experience to walk in rustling silk and tapping heels through halls filled with ghosts. For Dunst, exquisitely but unstuffily costumed by Milena Canonero (who deserves an Oscar for this work), it was a very sensual role. “You breathe differently in those dresses; you move in a special way,” Dunst says. To prepare herself, on the night a scaled-down crew was filming her in the emotionally charged balcony scene, she walked alone through the palace in the dark. “I could look in those mirrors,” she says. “Be still in myself. Feel my place in that house.”
 
It is Coppola's third full-length film, after The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation. With a $40 million budget, it is by far her most ambitious project. She was aware that her subject is controversial—that people, especially in France, either see the queen as a saint and martyr or really, really hate her. But Coppola forgot about all that and brought her own Marie Antoinette to life. In her film, history is seen from a very feminine young woman's point of view. In the director's mind it forms a trilogy with the previous two films, exploring the theme of young women discovering who they are. The queen's love of fashion particularly interested her. “You're considered superficial and silly if you're interested in fashion,” Coppola says. “But I think you can be substantial and still be interested in frivolity. The girl inLost in Translation is just about to figure out a way of finding herself, but she hasn't yet. In this film she makes the next step. I feel that Marie Antoinette is a very creative person.”

 

 

 

All sources from: http://www.vogue.com/magazine/article/kirsten-dunst-teen-queen/#/magazine-gallery/marie-antoinette/11