French Fancy

Velvet Empire indulged in fine wine and cake while watching Sophia Coppola's version of "Marie Antoinette" in Covent Garden last night. While many have booed the film and said it is little more than a two-hour pop video, I'd beg to differ. Following on closely in the vein of "The Virgin Suicides", Sophia has delivered a sumptuous two-hour Adam & The Ants video, circa 1982 - and nobody did it better than gun-toting Stuart Goddard, so you know you're in good company.

Kirsten Dunst is perfectly cast as the indulgent Austrian/French queen, as is Marianne Faithful as her snotty mama, although Steve Coogan is rather distracting as Ambassador Mercy - it is still hard to shake off Alan Partridge. And the choice of music to accompany this film is impeccable. The highlight being, without a shadow of a doubt, Siouxsie & The Banshee's "Hong Kong Garden" to accompany a hedonistic masked ball. Velvet Empire will shortly be hunting down a copy of the soundtrack to add to her collection.

Slight grumbles: while the final still of the palace rooms is a fantastic shot, it makes for rather an aprupt end - and while it's good to leave your audience wanting more, I didn't feel it was a satisfactory end (largely because Marie Antoinette was still in posession of her head). And obviously the plot is riddled with inconsistiencies and inaccuracies, but hell - when a film looks this good, surely Mr Kipling is hunting down the rights as we speak to throw in a few E numbers, package it up in a pink box and ship it off to the supermarkets?