Marie Antoinette begins and ends with âGoodbyeâ, in sequences that almost disturbingly juxtapose with one another.
The audience is introduced to a fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette as she prepares to leave behind a halcyon Viennese childhood. It is the spring of 1770, and the once Hapsburg archduchess, now Bourbon dauphine, will journey across the Austrian Empire to the Kingdom of France to wed her betrothed, Louis Auguste. Clutching her tawny pug, Mops, the young Antoinette bids farewell to Austria and her mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, then climbs into the beautifully outfitted carriage commissioned by her grandfather-in-law, King Louis XV, to escort her to Versailles. Staring out of the windows of the royal coach, she admires the Germanic forests while Mops makes himself comfortable on her lap. Antoinette turns her attention to a miniature of her future husband, the only image that she has of the dauphin and whom she will meet for the first time once she has crossed the border from Austria into France. The days of the journey drag on before she finally reaches the tiny island on the Rhine where she will be conducted through her remise ceremony to emerge thoroughly French.
The film closes nearly two decades later, in October of 1789. Marie Antoinette, Queen of France for 15 years, is escorted from Versailles by the mob that has stormed the palace in the early days of the Revolution. She now clutches her four-year-old son, the dauphin Louis Charles, as she enters the coach that will carry the royal family from the aureate chùteau. Inside of the carriage, which bears no resemblance to the grandeur of the one that brought Antoinette there for the first time as an adolescent, Louis Charles, and her daughter, Marie-ThérÚse, sleep on her lap. Rather than the portrait of her betrothed that she pondered curiously in the first carriage scene, she is comforted now by the presence of Louis XVI, her husband of so many years.
âAre you admiring your lime avenue?â, he earnestly asks of his wife (fun fact: Louis XVI did in fact pose this question, but it was to his younger sister, the princesse Ălisabeth, who is not depicted in this scene of the film). âIâm saying goodbyeâ, Marie Antoinette responds. Just as she said her farewells to Vienna when she was fourteen, never to see her homeland again, the thirty-three-year old Queen now says goodbye to Versailles, her home of 19 years, never to see it again. The blues and bright tones, sunlight, and vividness of the initial scenes have been washed over in muted hues, greys, and a burning, foreboding sunrise that does not suggest a hopeful end to this story.
Beginning with the image of a teenage girl comfortably in her bed in Vienna, the film ends with an image of her bedchamber at Versailles, in the aftermath of the rioting of the Parisian market women within the palace. Marie Antoinette has been pulled from her bed and forced to Paris. The bed has been bayoneted, in the vain hope of murdering her. The mirrors which once reflected her beautiful image are now destroyed. The chandelier has fallen from the ceiling, an alarming suggestion of her fate. Beginning with a goodbye that might lead her to a glittering, auspicious and uncertain future, Marie Antoinette ends with a goodbye that signifies an uncertain future of unspeakable terror.
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