Marie-Antoinette (2006), Fashion queens and Hollywood stars

Today's Hollywood on- and off-screen imagery participates dynamically in the “celebrification” of society, a vast phenomenon prompting criticism of feminine obsessions for self-adornment and luxury. A convergence of fascination and repulse to which Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette contributes creating a metaphor of the Hollywood dream of stellar acclaim in the new millennium. The contradictions inherent in this dream are revealed by a phantasmagoria of Hollywood stardom that uses the popularization of the last queen of France vilified as the emblem of the Ancien Régime’s decadence but exalted as the apex of style and beauty. The queen’s pressures to conforming to the Court’s rules evoke Hollywood Stars’ carving their space of visibility inside a system of image-production. A nostalgia for an aristocratic status of fame is conveyed, as much glamorous as it is ephemeral. High fashion's prestige, reverberated by costume design, substantiates an elitist imagery celebrating an Olympus of taste perpetuated by Hollywood filmmaking where Coppola belongs, while a paradoxical convergence of democratic idealism and high cast celebration comes to the fore, echoing myriad forms of self-publicity and celebrity cults disseminated outside Hollywood’s realm and scopes.