Reading Versailles as a Bedroom

FIELD NOTES

Sofia Coppola films Versailles not as a monument but as the bedroom of an eighteen-year-old, and turns the palace interior into a reading of the girl living inside it.

 

THE QUEEN’S BEDCHAMBER AT VERSAILLES, A PUBLIC ROOM WHERE THE QUEEN WAS DRESSED IN FRONT OF THE COURT. PHOTOGRAPH BY JORGE LÁSCAR, CC BY 2.0.

 

Thirty minutes into Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola stages the morning dressing as a small ordeal of etiquette. The young queen stands half-undressed and visibly cold while her chemise travels down a line of ranking women, because the rule permits only the highest-born person present to hand it to her, and the rule keeps resetting as someone of higher rank keeps entering the room. It plays as comedy and as cruelty at once. What matters is where Coppola puts the scene. This is not a throne room or a council chamber. It is a bedroom, and the bedroom is full of strangers watching a teenager get dressed.

None of this was invented for the screen. The real ritual opened each morning with the gazette des atours, a book of fabric swatches the queen pinned to choose the day’s gowns, of which etiquette required three. The dressing followed a fixed choreography keyed to the furniture of the bedchamber and to the exact rank of everyone allowed inside it. Coppola paced the sequence, by her own account, to the tempo of All That Jazz, which is the right instinct, because the morning rising was always a piece of theatre. The queen was the show, and the room was the set.

The room was built for exactly this. The Chambre de la Reine was a public chamber, described in its own archives as a place for the theatrical staging of power. The queen slept there and received visitors there; she was dressed in front of the court, and she delivered her children in front of witnesses, nineteen of them born inside the room. A gilded balustrade ringed the bed, and at Versailles that railing marked a real border, the side kept for the queen and the side left to the courtiers and guests. The chamber is kept as she left it on the sixth of October 1789, down to the white silk brocaded with lilac and peacock feathers and the mother-of-pearl jewel cabinet that Schwerdfeger delivered in 1787. Behind the bed, a small door hidden in the wall hangings led to a cramped suite of private cabinets, the only rooms where she could shut herself away, and it was through that door that she fled the mob in 1789.

Coppola’s move is to film this public room as if it were a private one. The period film as a form tends to use an interior like this as document or as spectacle, a faithful reconstruction to admire or a backdrop for the plot to cross. She uses it as psychology instead. The camera stays close to Kirsten Dunst and low, at the height of the dressing table and the kicked-off slipper, until Versailles stops reading as History and starts reading as the bedroom of a watched, bored young girl. The production had unprecedented access to the palace and shot inside the actual bedchamber; when they were not filming in Marie Antoinette’s real room, the crew used it to store their equipment. The most famous interior in Europe was, for the length of the shoot, a teenager’s messy bedroom.

 

The colour came from a pastry box. Before filming, Coppola handed her costume designer, Milena Canonero, a box of Ladurée macarons and told her these were the shades she wanted; Canonero, who won an Academy Award for the result, built the whole court from that palette, with glances at Fragonard and at Galliano’s Dior. Ladurée then made the pastries seen on screen. The effect is that palace and pastry share a single surface, the same sugared pinks and greens on a silk bodice and on the plate beside it, until the entire film looks edible. The design is not decorating the story. It is the story.

The anachronisms follow from the same decision. The lavender Converse that sit for a single frame among the silk Manolo Blahnik pumps, and the post-punk scoring rooms that should be playing Rameau, are not jokes about the past. They are the film insisting that, from the inside, this girl’s life felt like a present tense. The very first shot makes the case, a cake eaten with one finger while a Gang of Four song plays and the queen glances back at the camera, as if she already knows she is being watched. K.K. Barrett, the production designer, treated the film’s objects as one continuous appetite, in which the food and the clothes and the rooms are all the same thing to want. The film was booed at Cannes and dismissed as all surface, and the better critics have since answered that the surface is the argument: a teenager handed a palace experiences it as decor, and the camera takes her side, asking us to feel for the watched girl rather than the people watching her.

 

MARIE ANTOINETTE’S BEDROOM AT THE PETIT TRIANON, THE HOUSE SHE KEPT AS AN ESCAPE FROM THE COURT. PUBLIC DOMAIN.

 

This is why the film eventually leaves the palace. When the court grew unbearable the real queen withdrew to the Petit Trianon, a small neoclassical house in the grounds, and Coppola follows her into rooms scaled for four people rather than the hundreds who attended a court assembly. The decisive room there is the boudoir she had fitted with glaces mouvantes, mirrored panels that rise from the floor on a hidden mechanism to cover the windows, so that one turn of a crank sealed the room and removed her from view. Its corner windows looked out not onto the geometry of the French gardens, the old vocabulary of absolute control, but onto an English garden built to look like liberty. The boudoir is the precise inverse of the bedchamber. One room was engineered to be looked into; the other was engineered so that no one could look in.

 

Further out she built the Hameau, a hamlet of thatched cottages around a lake where she could perform rural simplicity, and where the rough Norman exteriors concealed interiors finished by the cabinetmakers who worked the palace. Coppola reads this as longing rather than hypocrisy. The Hameau is a young woman decorating a fantasy of a simpler self, the eighteenth-century version of redoing a bedroom in order to become a different person. The film gives the fake village the same gravity it gives the Hall of Mirrors, because to the girl they are one project, rooms assembled to hold a feeling she cannot otherwise reach.

What Coppola understood, and what the design press has largely missed in a film usually shelved under fashion, is that an interior can be read as a mind. The costume drama uses rooms to fix when we are. Marie Antoinette uses them to fix who someone is, and how little choice she had in becoming it. The last image is the bedchamber after the mob has passed through it, wrecked and emptied, and it is no longer a historic room. It is the inside of a person, left exactly as she left it.

 

Sources: Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette: The Journey; Sight & Sound; Yale University Library Film Notes; Château de Versailles; The Conversation.

— The Home&Decor Editors