Before The Great, there was Marie Antoinette – ignore 2006’s reviews, it’s pretty great too. By Amelia Berry. Booed at Cannes and dismissed by critics, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette nevertheless holds up remarkably well. Amelia Berry explores just why people got it so wrong back in 2006. "At its core, Marie Antoinette is a film that works with two main ideas. The first is a celebration of the history of the feminine in cinema and so, to a large extent, the history of camp in cinema. The second is the dark irony of playing out a story of a young woman’s life against the known quantity of her brutal death. The problem is, that both of these ideas demand that we take women and femininity seriously, and that we recognise that vanity, foolishness, and imprudence do not strip away a person’s humanity, even if that person is a woman."