After she won an Oscar for "Lost In Translation" (2003), Sofia Coppola—the heir to the legendary Coppola film dynasty—faced overwhelming expectations regarding her follow-up. Three years later, she released "Marie Antoinette" (2006) to a lack luster reception from critics. Some enjoyed her highly stylized interpretation as it added modern flair to an arcane subject, while others found the whimsical nature nauseating and unrealistic to the time. Some may feel that this film lacks substance but I would argue the opposite, this film is a visual spectacle but is also able to humanize one of the most demonized historical figures of all time. As a first time viewer, one awaits Marie's beheading at the guillotine with sick excitement. However, Coppola masterfully side-steps around this horror; and even more impressively, by the end of the film compels the audience to not even realize they missed it. This film is easily one of my favorites, not just of Coppola's but of all time. We go into this movie expecting to loathe Marie, but through Coppola's artistry we come out of it wanting to fiercely protect her.

Coppola's visually intoxicating film explores Marie Antoinette, brilliantly played by Kirsten Dunst, through the lens of a teenage girl, not a sterile historical figure. We all have a perception of Marie Antoinette as being a superficial airhead that inanely proclaimed "Let them eat cake," to the starving French public. However, in this two hour film Coppola is able to erase this tired trope and humanize her protagonist by portraying her as a vulnerable young woman. It is impossible, as an audience member, to not empathize with Marie considering she was forced to abandon her family and homeland in order to marry a foreign prince and produce his heirs for a country that loves to hate her.

Film critic, Robert Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and said that the film "centers on the loneliness of being female and surrounded by a world that knows how to use you but not how to value and understand you." This is a powerful motif that still resonates with teenage girls today. Through Coppola's brilliant use of modern music and language she is able to compel her audience to sympathize with this teenager that is dealing with similar feelings of isolation and confinement that we all inevitably endure. The teenage girls of two hundred years ago are really not that different from the teenage girls of today. Coppola's theme of women’s subjectivity is recurrent throughout her films. She focuses on "women’s efforts to recognize and escape the comfortable bubbles in which male-dominated societies, classic and modern, both exalt and entomb them," as said by Roger Ebert.