It's dull to be the queen

I can't think of a time when I've felt more sympathy for what a filmmaker was trying to accomplish than while watching Marie Antoinette, the latest film from director Sofia Coppola. Using contemporary music, dreamy montages, gorgeous pastels and 21st century dialogue, Coppola tries to shatter period-piece boundaries. And at times, she succeeds beautifully.

To carry out her plan, Coppola has cast Kirsten Dunst as the 14-year-old Marie, a young woman who arrived in Versailles to marry Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), the dauphin of France. After I got over the shock of seeing Schwartzman in powdered wig and royal regalia, I even began to buy him as the sexually indifferent Louis, a king who had difficulty deflowering his queen. Marie Antoinette, an Austrian teenager, married Louis as part of a deal to cement relations between Austria and France.

When she arrived at the French border, she went through an elaborate transfer ceremony designed to strip her of all Austrian detritus, including her pet pug. Once at Versailles, the young queen-in-waiting was mistreated and mistrusted. Later, Louis' lack of sexual appetite was blamed on her.

In short, it wasn't always good to be the queen. So Marie did what any frustrated teenager might. She partied like it was 1776.

Dunst, gorgeous in period costumes that threaten to consume the entire screen, makes a convincing teen queen who ran up enormous debts while enjoying the good life. For her part, Coppola suffuses the film with a plush insularity that mirrors the isolated condition of the French court in pre-revolutionary France. It's as if everyone lives inside a grandly iced cake.

And if you think Imelda Marcos had a shoe thing, wait until you see Marie Antoinette try on the latest in foot fashions. At court, the characters don't quite speak; they murmur and whisper. When a merchant unfurls a new piece of fabric for the woman who will become queen, you can hear her attendants anachronistically sighing, "Oh wow!

" Coppola must have wanted to point out the vacuous quality of ladies-in-waiting at a time when the court, like Louis, was lost in self-absorbed impotence. You may find yourself remembering Marie Antoinette as a series of luscious tableaux. And although individual scenes have motion, the whole enterprise feels immobile.

Marie Antoinette offers a stunning example of how difficult it is to make a movie about people who do nothing of consequence and in which nothing much happens. Still, there's some fun to be had in watching Dunst loll her way from giggling adolescence to stunted adulthood, all in a palatial world where great piles of food took on near-architectural qualities, as did the enormous hairdos and sumptuously set tables. Coppola keeps the supporting performances to a minimum.

Judy Davis appears as the Comtesse de Noailles, a royal scold. Asia Argento plays Madame Du Barry, the mistress of Louis XV, portrayed with comic gusto by Rip Torn. (Don't ask about the accent.

) And Danny Huston brings life into the ornate but moribund court. He plays Marie's brother, an older fellow who arrives to give Louis advice about how to conduct himself in the bedroom. Any filmmaker who uses contemporary music in a historical drama takes a risk.

Sometimes the music (Gang of Four) shakes us into unexpected awareness. At other times, it's a distraction. I'm assuming that Coppola wanted to set a mood to which contemporary audiences could easily relate.

There's pathos, as well. When Marie retreats to Le Petit Trianon, the country estate Louis gives her, she valiantly tries to appreciate nature and enjoy her children. (Yes, Louis eventually fulfilled his connubial duties.

) And if we're to conclude anything about the queen's character, it's that she was mostly a cloistered victim who knew nothing about the world beyond palace walls. I began by saying I felt a great appreciation for what Coppola was trying to accomplish. That's true, but at the same time, I have to say Marie Antoinette seems a lavish failure.

Ambition and achievement don't quite match, and this look at royal collapse flirts with too much boredom. Coppola has made a large-scale but thematically skimpy movie about a lonely girl who tried to turn her life into one long party. Marie Antoinette seems more like a bored young wife with too many credit cards than a callous monarch who vigorously disdains the common folk.

Coppola doesn't dwell on the events that follow the storming of Versailles. We don't get to watch the queen's head roll. Perhaps because Marie Antoinette is all surface and royal fizz, Coppola has difficulty expanding her lone observation about the devastating shallowness of court life into a full-blooded movie.

Watching Marie Antoinette compares to spending a couple of idle hours staring at a young peacock that's just learning to preen. By the end, the sad, preposterous emptiness of the court has overtaken the movie and turned it from a potentially intriguing drama into a forlorn, muzzy daydream.