How the Marie Antoinette soundtrack turned anachronism into art

Placing modern songs in historical settings, or vice versa, has been a common practice in entertainment for a while now. But more often than  not, it ends up feeling gimmicky and distracting, especially when it’s done in an attempt to seem ironic or cool. So when it does work, it’s typically due to how effectively the songs elaborate on the characters and themes at play. This is precisely what makes the soundtrack of Sofia Coppola’s opulent third feature Marie Antoinette so great and why it continues to endure long after its divisive debut at the Cannes Film Festival twenty years ago. The film chronicles the life and legacy of its titular protagonist (Kirsten Dunst), who was coerced as a teenager into marrying the shy Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman) in order to strengthen the alliance between France and Austria. Marie’s struggle to adapt to the rigid monarchy and bear an heir to the throne sends her on a journey of quiet rebellion, which Coppola renders through an aural landscape of Eighties new wave and post-punk, mid-Aughts indie rock, and 18th-century baroque compositions. 

Not everyone was initially on board with Coppola’s creative liberties and postmodern vision. When Marie Antoinette premiered at Cannes in 2006, it received a polarized response, with some decrying the film’s kitschiness and loose, uncritical reimagining of the queen’s regime. But as its reappraisal in recent years has proven, Marie Antoinette was simply ahead of its time. Though light on plot and incident, the film works because its style is its substance, and its subversive soundtrack is a vital reflection of that intention. Curated by frequent Coppola collaborator and music supervisor Brian Reitzell, the film’s eclectic selection of classical and contemporary music vividly captured the paradox of Marie: a woman of high stature with little agency who sought out hedonism to escape the repressive atmosphere and the gendered expectations imposed on her.

The soundtrack—alongside Milena Canonero’s stunning, Oscar-winning costume design, K.K. Barrett’s exquisite production design, and Lance Acord’s beautifully lush camerawork—plays a key role in illustrating Marie’s inability to reign over France and rein over herself. Coppola and Reitzell reserve the more modern needle drops for whenever Marie attempts to circumvent her lack of autonomy by doing something of her own volition. We witness that right from the jump with Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not in It.” As it plays over the opening credits and a brief shot of Marie lounging and smiling mysteriously at the camera, the song’s playful lyrics on the hollowness of extravagance (“The problem of leisure / What to do for pleasure”) atop jutting guitar chords immediately establish Coppola’s thesis and the punk-rock sensibility that shapes the film. English band Bow Wow Wow’s music conveys Marie’s appetite for pleasure and love of  lavish partying even further, from flirting with handsome strangers (“Aphrodisiac”) to endless consumption of champagne and cakes (“I Want Candy”) to the blissful comedown after a night out (“Fools Rush In”). Tracks like New Order’s “Ceremony” and the Radio Dept.’s “Pulling Our Weight” also underscore transitory but memorable beats in Marie’s arc, the former playing during a celebratory montage of Marie’s birthday after she becomes queen, and the latter during a serene picnic she hosts while Louis goes horseback riding with his pack of beagles.

Sometimes, the songs themselves act as a literal escape for Marie, such as when she skips through the hallway of her palace to The Strokes’ “What Ever Happened?” then flops down on her bed as she fantasizes about her brief affair with Swedish general Count Fersen (Jamie Dornan). It’s a jarring but strangely excellent moment in the film, not just because of the clever parallels between Marie and Julian Casablancas’ rich kid angst, but because of how well it dialed into the teenage girl spirit Coppola imbued within Marie. The painterly shot of her dazed expression, coupled with Casablancas’ roaring verse (“I wanna be beside her / She wanna be admired”), reads as a liberatory and slightly bittersweet moment for her character. She gets to daydream about an experience that may not come again—but  only briefly, as the song’s feverishly looping guitar riff gets abruptly cut off by the arrival of the next scene.

Where the modern needle drops seduce, the classical selections demonstrate how ridiculous and melancholic Marie’s lifestyle can be as well. The silliness comes through in Roger Neill’s lively “Concerto in G,” which swells repeatedly to comedic effect whenever Marie endures her daily rituals of being woken up by a crowd of court officials and eating in silence with Louis. But for the most part, the traditional-sounding cues are used to reflect Marie’s sadness about not being able to develop a sense of self despite being afforded everything. Dustin O’Halloran’s gentle, lilting “Opus 17” hovers in the beginning as Marie journeys from Austria to France to start her new life, while his piece “Opus 36” manifests towards the end as Marie hugs her court goodbye. In an emotional reversal from “What Ever Happened?,” Aphex Twin’s now-iconic “Avril 14th” captures Marie’s quiet grief as Count Fersen departs. 

The film’s diegetic use of classical music is used to great effect, too—in one instance, it emphasizes the suffocation of Marie’s boredom, like when a group of musicians (played by Coppola’s husband Thomas Mars and his band Phoenix) perform a song for her; in another, it drills in the consequences of her disrupting the order of things, like when she attends the opera and disrupts the theater etiquette by applauding at the end of the performance. The first time she claps, the audience joins her. By the film’s end, they refuse, as her lavish spending has finally caught up with her and cemented her infamy. 

Marie Antoinette culminates in a final needle drop that not only brings Marie’s story to a shattering close but also aptly encapsulates the tragedy of her life. As she and her husband flee their home, the film cuts to a single shot of her bedroom, now torn apart and smashed to pieces. The Cure’s sobering “All Cats Are Grey” plays over it and into the credits, its ghostly synths and aerodynamic drumming precisely capturing the mournful tone of that last image and its lingering impact. The song’s title also speaks to the evaporation of Marie’s wealth, alluding to a 16th-century proverb about the meaninglessness of appearances. Though the film doesn’t show the grim fate the real-life Marie would go on to meet, Coppola’s simple, understated conclusion still packs a wallop, suggesting there is something profoundly tragic about being shielded from the real world, that parties and money are fun but ultimately empty, and that Marie’s whole life was stuck in an endless loop of frivolity because she was never given a chance to grow up and become a real person. 

The genius of Coppola’s exacting stylistic touches is, of course, not limited to Marie Antoinette. She’s always been a master of dramatizing this kind of out-of-time ennui through her soundtracks, be it the mix of Seventies pop and Air’s atmospheric score in The Virgin Suicides, the time capsule of millennial indie-pop in 2012’s The Bling Ring, or the combination of doo-wop, alt-rock, and electronica in her other loose biopic/gilded-cage drama, 2023’s Priscilla. But what makes Marie Antoinette specifically so great is how it defied the expectations around a story that could’ve easily just been another stuffy costume drama. Its influence can be felt across modern period pieces like TV’s Bridgerton, Dickinson, and The Buccaneers, or Emerald Fennell’s recent “Wuthering Heights” film, though none of those could quite capture the creative singularity Coppola and Reitzell achieved twenty years ago. History may never absolve Marie Antoinette, but time has been far kinder to Sofia Coppola’s reimagining of her. 

Sam Rosenberg is a filmmaker and freelance entertainment writer from Los Angeles with bylines in The Daily Beast, Consequence, AltPress, and Metacritic. You can find him on X @samiamrosenberg.

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