On how Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006) uses anachronism as a formal tool.

Marie Antoinette uses contemporary indie music — New Order, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Gang of Four — on the soundtrack of an 18th-century historical drama. This is either an obvious error or a deliberate formal strategy, and those who read it as error misunderstand the film.

Coppola is not trying to depict the historical Marie Antoinette. She is depicting the experience of a specific kind of adolescence — gilded, constrained, misunderstood, observed — through the visual world of Versailles. The music locates the emotional experience in the present even as the costumes and settings locate it in the past.

The anachronism is the argument: what Antoinette experiences — the disconnect between the luxury of her circumstances and the loneliness of her position, the way she is consumed by a role she didn't choose — is not historically specific. It is adolescent in a way that the contemporary music can express better than period-appropriate music could.

The film was criticized at Cannes for its superficiality. I think the criticism mistakes surface for substance: the surface is the substance. A film about a young woman whose life is entirely composed of surface is, appropriately, made primarily from surface.