[35mm screening as part of Melbourne Fashion Festival]

Coppola's sublime masterpiece, a breathtaking vision of unbridled femininity that dares to present a sympathetic portrait of a despised historical figure.

I’ve seen this film three times and as ever I'm swept up in the way Coppola so thrillingly conveys the rush of youth – running headlong through palace gardens to catch the sunrise after an all-night party, staggering down long hallways weighed down with the exquisite agony of impossible infatuation, delighting in dres and chowing down and revelling in your own fleeting beauty.

Thinking about Marie Antoinette I'm reminded of the often misunderstood Lolita subculture, which – putting aside its mis-ascribed sexual implications – horrifies many people on an aesthetic level because it takes ideas of what it means to be feminine and applies them at their most extreme: towers of curls, miles of lace, tier upon tier of frothy petticoats. It's a subversion of contemporary ideas about womanhood and a reclamation of the trappings of girlishness. I respect it, and I wish it wasn’t so widely dismissed it as superficial frivolity.

People seem to have this idea of Sofia Coppola as an apologist for oblivious excess, but although she’s undoubtedly a child of privilege she also interrogates it from a distinct and distinctive perspective. Marie Antoinette is my favourite of her films, possibly the most emblematic of her ideas, and a dazzling piece of pure cinema that should be considered among the great revisionist history films.