[7] Fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette, the daughter and youngest child of Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, is a beautiful, charming and naïve archduchess.

After a masquerade ball, Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI return to find the king dying of smallpox; he orders du Barry to leave Versailles.

Marie Antoinette's brother, Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, comes to visit, counseling her against her constant parties, advice that she finds easy to ignore.

Joseph meets Louis XVI at the Royal Zoo and explains to him the "mechanics" of sexual intercourse in terms of "key-making", as one of the king's favorite hobbies is locksmithing.

As France's financial crisis worsens, food shortages and riots intensify, her public image deteriorates and her luxurious lifestyle and seeming indifference to the struggles of the French people earned her the name "Madame Deficit".

As the queen matures, Marie Antoinette focuses less on her social life and more on her family and makes what she considers to be significant financial adjustments.

The film was planned to be an adaptation of Évelyne Lever's Marie Antoinette: The Last Queen of France, a biography she wrote for American readers in 2000.

Sofia Coppola bought the rights twice, but in the end she chose Antonia Fraser's biography Marie Antoinette: The Journey instead of Lever's book as the basis for her adaptation.

Coppola said the style for shooting was greatly influenced by the films of Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick, and Miloš Forman as well as by Ken Russell's Lisztomania.

She admitted to taking great artistic liberties with the source material, and said that the film does not focus simply on historical facts – "It is not a lesson of history.

[13] However, film critic Roger Ebert clarified that, in actuality, only a couple of journalists had been booing during the press screening, and that the media had sensationalised the event.

The website's critics consensus states, "Lavish imagery and a daring soundtrack set this film apart from most period dramas; in fact, style completely takes precedence over plot and character development in Coppola's vision of the doomed queen.

Her historical biopic plays like a pop video, with Kirsten Dunst as the doomed 18th century French queen acting like a teenage flibbertigibbet intent on being the leader of the cool kids' club.

[14] Critics who gave the film positive reviews included Danielle Attali of Le Journal du Dimanche, who praised it as "a true wonder, with stunning colors, sensations, emotions, intelligence".

[20] Philippe Paumier of the French edition of Rolling Stone said that, "Transformed into a sanctuary for the senses, the microcosm of power becomes this moving drama of first emotions and Marie Antoinette, the most delicate of looks on adolescence".

"[21] Among negative critical reviews, Jean-Luc Douin of Le Monde described Marie Antoinette as "kitsch and roc(k)oco" which "deliberately displays its anachronisms", and additionally as a "sensory film" that was "dreamt by a Miss California" and "orchestrated around the Du Barry or Madame de Polignac playground gossip".

[22] Alex Masson of Score thought the film had a script "which is often forgotten to the corruption of becoming a special issue of Vogue devoted to scenes of Versailles".

[21] In the newspaper Le Figaro, historian Jean Tulard called the film "Versailles in Hollywood sauce", saying that it "dazzles" with a "deployment of wigs, fans and pastries, a symphony of colors" which "all [mask] some gross errors and voluntary anachronisms".

She wrote that the film's characterisation of Marie Antoinette lacked historical authenticity and psychological development: "In reality she did not spend her time eating pastries and drinking champagne!

She also expressed the view that "better historical films" such as Barry Lyndon and The Madness of King George succeeded because their directors were "steeped in the culture of the time they evoked".

In France, the double-disc edition included additional special features: Sofia Coppola's first short film, Lick the Star, and a BBC documentary on Marie Antoinette.