Ana Fell Asleep First

Lost in Translation is my favorite film, which meant I came to Marie Antoinette with expectations Sofia Coppola had no realistic chance of meeting. I watched it anyway, with Ana, and tried genuinely to find what everyone seemed to be finding in it.

I couldn’t. The first half is almost entirely about losing her virginity, which is a legitimate subject, but the film keeps cycling back to the same scenes with the same dreamy visual logic, like a very expensive Groundhog Day with no punchline. Nothing accumulates. There’s no story underneath the aesthetics—just surfaces repeating themselves and Kirsten Dunst looking bored inside beautiful rooms. Ana fell asleep an hour in. I stayed through to the end and was rewarded with an ending that barely qualifies as one. The reviews were largely positive and I still don’t understand why. The music was good in places. That’s my full defense of it.

I slept in Ana’s bed that night. Irina made some strange endearing sounds in the dark that woke me up a few times. In the morning Ana and I went through photos from her childhood—genuinely sweet—and then she walked me halfway to the train station. Napoleon is next on the study list. One revolution at a time.