The Front Row: “Marie Antoinette”

For her third feature, “Marie Antoinette,” from 2006 (which I discuss in this clip), Sofia Coppola took the daring step—after her adaptation of “The Virgin Suicides” and the inward journey of “Lost in Translation”—of reconstructing one of the most familiar and stereotyped characters in history, along with her lavishly artificial habitat. But Coppola’s bold leap of scale, design, and time is utterly logical, as her subsequent films have shown. Her great theme is subjectivity—women’s subjectivity—and women’s efforts to recognize and escape the comfortable bubbles in which male-dominated societies, classic and modern, both exalt and entomb them.