a pair of queens

seeing both Marie Antoinette and The Queen last week was entirely coincidental, but ultimately drew up comparisions as I was watching the latter, and I can only imagine the future raft of undergrad film school papers to come comparing the two.

MA sees the (somewhat) unlikely casting of Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzman as the unlikely young queen and king of france. Schwartzman is a particular pleasure in conveying Louis XVI at his meekest, both with his advisors and with his wife, and the audience takes in the extent of their uncomfortable union. MA heavily parallels Lost In Translation in creating an insulated, insular world of the female lead, which frankly doesn't have a lot going on in it. Coppola finishes the rather limited plot on yet another abrupt ending, which though not necessarily a bad thing, reinforces that she's not very good at goodbyes.

The Queen boasts a much more familiar story (I do admit to having looked up the MA backstory in detail on after the film), with an all-too-familiar cast of public characters. This creates some difficulty in the first third or so of the film as suspension of disbelief is a little tough to come by-is that really what they were doing? But after a while, you settle in and get very comfortable with Mirren's performance, and by the time she's viewing the flowers outside of Buckingham, it's a pretty close estimation of reality-well, I think.

It's funny to question the truthfulness of The Queen's events, when actually the events of MA are much more fantastical, but because they occured so long ago, I'd tend to take it more at face value. huh.