But what about your court, and all this pageantry?

Because I have friends in high places (the Writers’ Guild of America), I managed to snag an invitation to a private screening of Sofia Coppola’s new movie “Marie Antoinette.” The “Lost in Translation” director’s punk-rock take on the life of France’s last queen features Kirsten Dunst in the title role and miles of sumptuous fabric. It is visually decadent but otherwise unremarkable.

The film follows the young royal from her seemingly idyllic life as a daughter of Austria’s Hapsburg dynasty through a long bumpy journey to France where she is introduced to her intended, the future French King Louis XVI and to the uncomfortably regimented life of the French court at Versailles.

To mitigate her imprisonment and her husband’s sexual indifference to her, Marie Antoinette indulges in fanciful frocks, perpetual partying and lots and lots of dessert. Meanwhile the French masses are quietly starving. It is only when a peasant mob threatens to storm Versailles that the Queen is roused from her self-imposed intellectual exile.

The movie ends as the King and Queen are being taken away from Versailles to be imprisoned while the Revolutionaries debate their fate and that of the French Monarchy. It ends just as Marie Antoinette is about to become a historically significant and, in truth, interesting character.

The question-and-answer session with the actors that followed the screening left more of an impression than the movie itself.

The moderator was a film critic from “US Weekly” magazine. She introduced the Q & A by announcing how thrilled she was to have been asked to host, since she absolutely loved the movie.

There was a pause before the diminutive Dunst came bounding down the side alley announcing that “Jason [Schwartzman, her costar and Coppola’s cousin] is in the bathroom.”

They decided to start without him, which seemed like the right thing to do until it became apparent that neither Ms. Dunst nor the moderator had charisma enough to carry the event on their own. After a few awkward exchanges, Ms. Dunst admited defeat. “Where’s Jason?” she pleaded, “I’ve never done this without him.”

Thankfully it wasn't long before Mr. Schwartzman appeared, professing his embarrassment at having been caught in the men’s room. From that point, he took the reigns and at least made an attempt to be both clever and funny, though not often successfully.

Mr. Schwartzman explained that Ms. Coppola decided to cut the movie off where she did because she did not want to tell the Marie Antoinette story that everyone would recognize. She wanted to tell the tale of a young girl thrown into a situation for which she was not prepared. Early on, the director had planned to take the story all the way to its gory conclusion. But she decided that the film would have been too long unless she left out much of the meat from the Queen’s earlier years.

Fair enough, but to me the film, as it is, is too long. Two hours is more than I want to spend watching a young girl oscillate between manic shopping and gambling and anguish over her husband’s failure to plant his royal seed.

The moderator sprinkled her questions with compliments and every other audience member who stood up to ask a question began by declaring that they loved the film. I was struck by this because, while it may have been mildly entertaining, I didn’t see anything to love in this film except, maybe, the soundtrack.

The second time an audience member remarked on Ms. Dunst’s strong performance, I began to wonder whether I was the only one who found her a little disappointing. I’ve always thought of Kirsten Dunst as a fine actor, but in this movie, I felt she sometimes sounded like a person reciting memorized lines rather than speaking with conviction. To be fair, a lot was asked of her since she is in almost every frame of the movie. And her wordless emotional scenes were convincing.

Near the end an audience member asked Ms. Dunst if she saw any parallels between her character’s experience and her own real life. Ms. Dunst answered that, like in Hollywood, there was a lot of gossip at Versailles, but that is where the similarities end.

“I can’t imagine what it would be like to be Queen,” she said.

Always a polite audience member, I had to stifle a laugh at this point. Putting aside the fact that, as an actor, to imagine what it was like to be Queen was precisely what she was charged with doing, I couldn’t accept that Ms. Dunst didn’t see any further similarities between her character and herself.

At that moment, her and Mr. Schwartzman’s “handlers,” standing off to one side, were signaling to the moderator that it was time to wrap things up. I’ve seen pictures in magazines of Ms. Dunst draped in gowns and jewels that cost more than most people’s annual salaries; I certainly could point out a few more similarities.

Though we espouse equality, we humans love to place other mere mortals above ourselves. Since we’ve dethroned almost all the world’s monarchs, we have only our celebrities to worship now.

That’s why Ms. Dunst is paid obscene amounts to do a job that most people would do just for the fun of it. The hoi polloi are taxed ten bucks a movie to support her lifestyle. We are told that it is because she possesses a unique talent, like a noble birth, and so deserves to be where we should never aspire to reach. She herself is told this, and she believes it because an audience full of journalists, courtesans by another name, pretends to love a completely forgettable film just to flatter her.

Coppola seems to want to tell us that it wasn’t Marie Antoinette’s fault that France went bankrupt; she was a regular girl, too wrapped up in her own problems to notice the difficulties her countrymen faced. When she did get wind of it, she was really quite saddened and even refrained from buying new diamonds. And she most definitely did not say, “Let them eat cake!” when told that the peasants had no bread.

This interpretation misses the point that if the Queen was ignorant, it was because she chose to be so. Had she cared to know how the peasants lived, she could have seen it. Certainly when she was imprisoned, and her life depended on it, she developed a keen interest in politics. Before then, she chose to stay isolated and insulated in all the comforts of Versailles. That alone was an offense.

The Q & A wrapped up and about half a dozen audience members hurried to the front seeking brushes with fame. Later, as they waited for me to come out of the restroom, my friends watched Ms. Dunst and crew walk past on their way out of the theater. The Chanel handbag she so casually carried could have paid someone’s rent or bought groceries for a family of four for a month.

Coppola film asks us to forgive the poor Queen in the same manner as we’re told that we should pity celebrities because they have to sign autographs and have their pictures taken everywhere they go. I, for one, have little sympathy for either.

tags: Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola, Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Celebrities, French Revolution, film