Coppola was given unprecedented access to Versailles, refurnishing and shooting in the Petit Trianon, the “rustic” Hameau de la Reine, the palace, and its grounds. MARIE ANTOINETTE had a $40 million production budget and was shot from January to April 2005. “I guess the main objective when I thought of making the movie of her story,” Coppola said, “was not to make a big historical epic-the biography’s a huge story-and I wanted to really focus on trying to make more an impressionistic telling from her point of view, because so many of the stories about Marie Antoinette are people’s perceptions of her.” The script was sourced from Antonia Fraser’s Marie Antoinette: The Journey, and was written by Coppola with Kirsten Dunst in mind for the title role. Sofia Coppola lets the queen eat frosting from a cupcake as an anachronistic French maid slides on her bubblegum pink kitten heels in the opening shot of 2006’s MARIE ANTOINETTE, while Gang of Four declares one of the film’s central concerns: “the problem of leisure, what to do for pleasure.” From there, Coppola creates an idiosyncratic and iconoclastic celebration of visual pleasure-what Fiona Handyside called a “willful embrace of superficiality and frivolity”-but does so in a way that constantly calls audience expectations and desires into focus and into question. Starring Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Judy Davis, Rip Torn, Rose Byrne, Asia Argento, Molly Shannon, Shirley Henderson, Danny Huston, Jamie Dornan, Tom Hardy, Mathieu Amalric, and Steve Coogan

In this original study, Handyside brings critical attention to a rare female auteur and in so doing contributes to important analyses of post-feminism, authorship in film, and the growing field of girlhood studies.Introduction by Pierre Saint-Amand and Archer Neilsonĭirected by sofia Coppola (2006) 123 mins These characters inhabit luminous worlds of girlish adornments, light and sparkle and yet find homes in unexpected places from hotels to swimming pools, palaces to strip clubs: resisting stereotypes and the ordinary.

Chapters reveal a post-feminist aesthetic that offers sustained, intimate engagements with female characters. Fiona Handyside here considers the careful counter-balance of vulnerability with the possibilities and pleasures of being female in Coppola's films - albeit for the white and the privileged - through their recurrent themes of girlhood, fame, power, sex and celebrity. From The Virgin Suicides to The Bling Ring, her work carves out new spaces for the expression of female subjectivity that embraces rather than rejects femininity. She has received numerous accolades including an Academy Award and two Golden Globes, and in 2004 became the first ever American woman to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar.

Sofia Coppola by Fiona Handyside