Monday Musing: The New Mannerists

Unlike the well loved and generally well reviewed 'Lost in Translation', Sophia Coppola's 'Marie Antoinette' struck a mostly sour note with the critics. I take two essays, one in The New Yorker by Anthony Lane and one in the New York Review of Books by Daniel Mendelsohn to be indicative of the general position. They are both written by intelligent critics and both essays contain useful insights. Mendelsohn's essay is more sympathetic to the movie. At least he is willing to admit that the idea of exploring the ‘inner life’ of Marie Antoinette is possible, if not explicitly interesting. Mendelsohn writes that, "there are scenes of great charm and freshness that suggest what it might have been like to be the immature and hapless object of so much imperial pomp". Lane, by contrast, writes the following: "Coppola films Versailles with a flat acceptance, quickening at times into eager montage, and declares, in her notes on the film, that she sought to capture her heroine’s 'inner experience'. Her what? This is like a manicurist claiming to capture the inner experience of your pinkie."

In the final analysis, Lane and Mendelsohn both accuse Coppola of surrendering to the shallowness that she is portraying. They both seem dissatisfied by Coppola’s unwillingness to step outside of the experiences she conveys. Portraying Marie Antoinette must not be just about portraying that ‘inner life’, it must also be a critical reflection on the failure of that life, which is inextricably related to the failure of the ancien regime and the subsequent developments of the French Revolution. Coppola’s failure, then, is the failure to have said anything significant about the Revolution and its meaning. The movie, these critics seem to be saying, is utterly lacking in its own critical edge and because of that it amounts almost to an endorsement of the empty superficiality that Marie Antoinette herself embodied.

This same kind of criticism, in general, has been applied to a handful of filmmakers of recent vintage, most notably Wes Anderson. I remember a friend commenting about Anderson a few years ago that his filmmaking could be described as Mannerism. The comment stuck with me. Yet it is this same 'Mannerism' that rubs critics the wrong way both in Anderson’s films and in Coppola’s. So we might as well call them the New Mannerists.

Mannerism was a term first applied to painting of the late Renaissance. It got its name from the stylized, one might even say 'affected', way that the Mannerists painted. The Mannerists were interested in style itself. And those who criticize Mannerism tend to do so from the perspective that it is style simply for the sake of style. Thus the connection to the New Mannerists like Anderson and Coppola. In criticizing Coppola’s 'Marie Antoinette', Lane and Mendelsohn were essentially asking, ‘Where’s the substance?’.

But I think Mannerism has a pretty good response to that question. There is something light, even breezy, about Mannerist painting and the way it plays with style and surface, the way it seems comfortable in the world it is portraying. Mannerists are not ‘getting to the bottom of things’ in the way that some of the powerful painters of the early Renaissance do. But that is not to say that they aren’t getting at anything at all. And this applies to the New Mannerists as well. Coppola and Anderson make films that feel nothing like the great works of, say, Antonioni or even the New Wave directors or, for that matter, the films of Francis Ford Coppola. The New Mannerists are conveying a different kind of experience. They are interested in getting a certain feel or a mood right and they value achieving that sense of mood far above accomplishments in narrative or character development.

Mannerists in general are not compelled primarily by subject matter and the films of the New Mannerists are not ‘about’ things in the way that other films are. That is one of the things I find so remarkable about Coppola’s 'Marie Antoinette'. There are few subjects of world history as fraught with content and meaning as the French Revolution. It's a minefield one is expected to come to with strong positions and the goods to back them up. Coppola lets the camera drift around in scene after scene where we learn next to nothing about the events of the day. We simply see daily life as it unfolds.

Even when the Revolution itself begins to occur—a prime opportunity for drama and narrative arc—it does so in an oddly stilted way, as a kind of non sequitur. Mendelsohn criticizes the movie for precisely this reason. He writes,

"The final silent image in this movie, so filled as it is with striking and suggestive images, tells you more about Coppola, and perhaps our own historical moment, than it could possibly tell you about Marie Antoinette. It's a mournful shot of the Queen's state bedchamber at Versailles, ransacked by the revolutionary mob the night before the Queen and her family were forced to leave, its glittering chandeliers askew, its exquisite boiseries cracked and mangled. You'd never guess from this that men's lives—those of the Queen's guards—were also destroyed in that violence; their severed heads, stuck on pikes, were gleefully paraded before the procession bearing the royal family to Paris. But Coppola forlornly catalogs only the ruined bric-a-brac. As with the teenaged girls for whom she has such sympathy, her worst imagination of disaster, it would seem, is a messy bedroom."

It is as if Coppola is not up to the serious events of the adult world and thus her movie must be a mockery of those events and that world. But that is not the truth that Coppola’s movie is after. Viewed from Marie Antoinette's perspective, from her 'inner experience', there was no other way for the French Revolution to come about than as a non sequitur whose immediate result is best portrayed as a messy bedroom. To me, that scene in the messy bedroom is lovely, disturbing…true.

To say that the New Mannerists are good is not to say that they are the only game in town or that goodness must now be measured with a Mannerist criterion. But when New Mannerism is good it is exceptionally so and it is producing movies that capture something important about the mood of our time. It captures a gesture, a moment, the passing of a moment that gets at something about who we are right now. It isn't a comprehensive picture, admittedly. The films of the New Mannerists succeed often in the degree to which they give us smallness, writ large.

There is a scene in Marie Antoinette, where she is riding in a carriage toward Versailles for the first time. Bored, she breathes onto the window, which leaves a steam mark that she proceeds to draw on, doodling absently as the motors of History churn away elsewhere. It is a moment just right, small and brilliant and beautiful.

Comments

[Daniel]

Bravo!

[fred lapides]

Maire a diaster of a film. Period. Boring. A waste. Translation a charming and fun-filled and moving film. But: I find it difficult to imagine any guy, middle aged, with an obviously pain in the butt wife, thousands of miles away, and that guy, on a bed with the likes of Scarlett J., sipping drinks and just chatting away! and nothing but nothing happens...this is a film made by a woman. Call me what you will but in fairness call me a fairly normal guy who staggers at the thought of closeness to so tempting a morsel and playing nice like that.

[Henry]

Some fairly normal guys would not cheat on their wives, even if they could get away with it. They might find it wrong, they might be afraid of feeling guilty, or they might feel that they would lose the right to insist that their wife remain faithful.

[gene]

I dunno...I always thought that M.A. was more about the French revolution (and subsequently about populist revolutions in contemporary times) than about Marie Antoinette, the person. It was a critique of Mannerist ideals the way the Baroque was a critique of Mannerism and Neo-Classicism was a critique of the Rococo in Antoinette's era.

[arp]

boring? a waste? how funny----I loved every shot of MA.

[MarkedExcess]

This "new mannerism" theory doesn’t quite close the gap. Praising MA and most Wes Anderson films for getting one aspect of filmmaking right (not narrative, not character development...but “style”) isn't enough to pardon boredom.

Would a really, really well lit film (but that fails in all other aspects) qualify as "good"? No. "Style" isn't a strong enough characteristic to carry a film.

[BobN]

To all the reviewers who felt that M.A. left them wanting something of more substance:

Let them eat popcorn!

[IvanKaramazov]

Interesting idea...and I might suggest that the Coen brothers, who often stand accused of the same crimes, might be included in this proposed movement. I'm not entirely sure whether I agree about the effect of Anderson's work, though; to me, his movies are great because the characters are at once exaggerated and unrealistic, yet also filled with a deeply human pathos.

[Nick]

You're reading too much into the "messy bedroom". Most of the film's running time more or less fetishizes the objects of Marie's pleasure. In the end these objects are destroyed. Her world is obliterated. I would think that's a fairly simple, straightforward image to end on.

A point which sort of spoils the New Mannerist idea is that both Coppola and Anderson seem to want to express something more. What annoys about their films is not that they're all style and no content but that-- not always, but in many key places-- they want to transcend their style and approach "real" content but cannot. Both Marie and Charlotte in "Lost In Translation" want more from their lives, they just can't get it for one reason or another. Coppola is wonderful at depicting that state of mind, except that it works in the case of a young college graduate stranded in Tokyo and not in the case of a real historical figure who played a key symbolic role in the French Revolution.

To offer one example of Coppola's unfulfilled ambition, some accounting has to be made of using Gang of Four on the soundtrack, along with other anachronistic songs and images. This is more than a stylistic choice. It urges upon the viewer a parallel between Marie's world and ours, literally "the problem of leisure", as stated in the lyric. For the New Mannerist critique to hold any water, Coppola's film would have to be perfectly self-contained, a pure hothouse flower. It isn't. I had a feeling as I was watching that Coppola knew at every turn in the story exactly what was missing. In a sense she reproduced Marie's anxiety. Something's wrong, but she can't put a name on it.

I don't mean to sound like I dislike Coppola and Anderson. They're two of the best filmmakers in the business today. "Lost In Translation" is underappreciated, hyped as it was at the time. But they have not shown, and sadly I don't think they ever will show, an ability to do more than conjure up some pretty tableaux.

[Randy]

I loved both of Sophia's films. Both of them were character drivien, not plot driven. Lost contained almost no dialogue, and what was dialogue hardly advanced the plot at all. What it did do, and the visual scenes, was show, filmatically, the isolation and loneliness of these two characters, highlighted by a totally foreign culture, which made them seem even more isolated.
But the man and the woman in Lost were isolated and lonely for different reasons, she because she didn't know what to do with her life (and she majored in philosophy!), and has high expectation for her new marriage that aren't being met, and he because he looks back over his life, wonders what he accomplished, thinks it might be over, and hasn't connected even with his children.
An affair wouldn't change any of this, and they characters know that, but the connect on some deep level, and in a way that they haven't with their spouses.

In MA, if you want to do a film on the french revolution, go ahead! But to try to do both, the film would have to be 20 hours long. MA was married to the King, yet we didn't even see much about the King -- we didn't get into his head why he couldn't consummate the marriage, or what he did or didn't do.

I'm really surprised at the criticism of MA. It was a truly wonderful film, and it was based on the book by Antonia Fraser, which was evenhanded and fair in it's treatment of MA. You have to understand, most people think of MA as an evil witch who hated the common people. So much of what we think of MA is wrong, wrong, wrong! This film is an attempt to right that wrong. She had limitations, of course, and could have done better. Isn't that true of all rulers? But the image of her is unfair. Sophia showed that she was indeed a wanton spendthrift as a young woman, but she eventually matured to a caring mother, and deeply cared for the french people as well. (She gave vast amounts of money to the poor at a time when it was simply not fashionable). As an Austrian in a french court, she was in an impossible situation to begin with.

Anyway, had Sophia picked any other historical character and did the same film, people would not object. It's because it is MA, whom we feel we have a right to hate, that we are upset that she is portrayed as a real human being.

And since art is supposed to challenge us and our assumptions, what better way to do so?

[Evan Read]

I loved Copolla's Marie Antointette. I also read Antonia Fraser's great biography on which it was based. For me one of the most central points of both works was Marie Antoinette's powerlessness as Queen and the viciously unfair way she was scapegoated for France's ills. I also think the movie is a great meditation on beauty, whatever moral judgement one makes of the surrounding political situation. Lastly, check out A. O. Scott's review in the NY Times for another perspective (http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/10/13/movies/13mari.html); he likes it very much and sees as a reflection on Hollywood.

[The CarpetMuncher]

I love Sofia, but Maria Antoinette just didn't work for me. They call them movies because the pictures are supposed to move. I felt like I was watching a painting. Love the fact that she went for it, but think she swumg and missed.

[sara Kramer]

Good piece, thanks for it. Also, thanks v. much to the person who recommended the Tony Scott review in the Times. I think he got the movie, too. Am i the only one who thought the film more successful than Lost in Translation? Or, at least more fun?