Marie Antoinette (BBC One, Thursday, 9pm) is the story of a glamorous foreigner who marries into a stuffy royal family, wreaking havoc in the process and playing her part in the eventual toppling of the institution. It’s a mystery why the BBC and Canal+ think this is an apt time to retell the tale.
What is perfectly clear, alas, is that all the life has been leeched out of this true-life melodrama, turning an epic account of privilege and downfall into a triumph of powdered wigs over gripping storytelling.
There’s none of the energy that rattled through The Favourite, which earned this series’ creator an Oscar nomination. This production portrays Marie Antoinette as a naive bore and the Bourbon dynasty as burping, guffawing provincials dressed like Adam Ant’s rhythm section
Deborah Davis, the series’ creator and writer, received an Oscar nomination for her screenplay for The Favourite, the poisonous black comedy orbiting the romantic life of Queen Anne. But the bleak energy that rattled through that film is entirely absent from this British-French coproduction. It portrays Marie Antoinette as a naive bore and the Bourbon dynasty as burping, guffawing provincials dressed like Adam Ant’s rhythm section.
We are introduced to “Toinette” (Emilia Schüle) as she is about to be shipped from Vienna to Versailles to be married to the future King Louis XVI (Louis Cunningham). She’s not exactly gung-ho about the alliance, which Austria’s Habsburg dynasty desperately hope will copper-fasten their place at the top table of European royalty. They want her to become the 18th-century equivalent of a top-tier influencer.
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When she arrives in France she is confronted by a ghastly parade of toffs and tiara-wearers. Louis XV (James Purefoy), her betrothed’s grandfather, is a sneery bully, the dauphin’s brother (Jack Archer) a creep with a wandering eye. Worst of all is Gaia Weiss’s Madame du Barry, mistress to the king and an arch manipulator who takes it upon herself to educate Marie Antoinette in the grisly specifics of producing an heir.
This proves less straightforward than anticipated. Louis is even more terrified than Marie Antoinette of the marital bower. After being marched to their bedchamber by a prurient court, the couple are left to get on with it – only for Louis to run from the room, his face paler than his wig.
The person who comes out best from Marie Antoinette is Sofia Coppola. She was pilloried in 2006 for making Marie Antoinette a feminist icon and giving her an American accent. Davis attempts much the same. She outfits the Bourbons with identikit posh British accents that rob the drama of any sense of Gallic otherness and implies that Marie was a victim of their patriarchal manipulations and desperation for an heir.
But the series tell us nothing about the France that would eventually rise up and throw down the Bourbons – and not much, either, about its heroine, who spends most of her screen time pouting and preening. What a right royal letdown.
