Marie-Antoinette by Sofia Coppola Returns to Versailles

Twenty years after the release of Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola returns to Versailles with “Marie-Antoinette par Sofia Coppola”, an exhibition at the Petit Trianon dedicated to the film and its visual world.

Original costumes by Milena Canonero, props, photographs, storyboards and other materials from the production are presented in the rooms where part of the film was shot.

When the film appeared in 2006, Coppola deliberately moved away from a conventional historical biopic. Her Marie Antoinette is first of all a young woman: surrounded by etiquette, excess, clothes, cakes, music and an extraordinary amount of beauty, but also searching for a private world of her own. Twenty years later, its pastel colours, powdered faces, extravagant gowns and irreverent mixture of eighteenth-century imagery and contemporary culture remain immediately recognisable.

I have a particular attachment to this film. It is one of those movies I return to simply for the pleasure of entering its visual world again. The colours, the silks, the flowers, the dressing rooms, the excess of Versailles and Coppola’s very personal interpretation of Rococo have influenced my own work since the beginning.

What I find most inspiring is Coppola’s ability to make the eighteenth century feel present. Rococo remains visible in every detail, from the clothes and interiors to the palette and decoration, but it is filtered through a contemporary sensibility rather than treated as a historical reconstruction. This is very close to the way I approach historical references in my own work: allowing the past to remain recognisable while giving it a place in the present.

Explore Madame’s Rococo Art Selection