Marie Antoinette(2006)

I watched this during recovery from a surgery that has left me unable to breathe through my nose for a week. I badly needed something frivolous, yet able to confer meaning through its whimsical randomness. Marie Antoinnette delivered. The whole thing is so splendorous and dreamy and the music absolutely rips. It's a film, but also a very well done video album?

Watching this film made me realize how little I thought about the French revolution. Not that this is something that should have been on my mind very much but there were some immediate implications of what happened that I should have considered, if not after middle school history classes, then at least after watching Les Mis.

Specifically, for example, the pettiness and out-of-touch-ness of the French monarchy to be sending aid to the Americans, who were ardently opposed to the very institution they rule, completely out of spite for the English, is nothing short of awe-inspiring. I've always said I love the French, because I think they are such a disgust-motivated people. You can see this in their election results today, but I didn't know it goes so far back, with such deep historical roots, and so high up at the same time. I wonder how my life would have turned out differently if i was inspired to be more driven by spite like this.

This film did not review well when it came out in 2006, probably because people were put off by parts of the story that looked like they were meant to garner sympathy for the decadent French aristocrats. I'm glad that it managed to find the appreciation and cult following it deserved in the decades that followed. It's not that she didn't deserve the guillotine; it's that she shouldn't have been put into this position by society and its institutions in the first place. No one should - things worth remembering.