IT IS Marie Antoinette as the world, let alone the French, have never seen her. A movie to be premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this week will liken the last pre-revolutionary Queen of France to Diana, Princess of Wales, and the ancien régime to the excesses of the modern super-rich.

The film, directed by Sofia Coppola, portrays the union of the teenage princess with the dauphin as the sacrifice of a young virgin to dynastic ambition. Coppola’s film also transposes “in-your-face” 21st-century English colloquialisms, broad American accents and a bold use of rock and pop music into the lush world of 18th- century Versailles.

The film is determinedly anachronistic. The royals are seen smoking little reed pipes and do so as if they are using modern-day spliffs. They are also seen downing huge quantities of champagne, although historians maintain that the drink was not in vogue at the French court in the 1770s.

Coppola admitted this weekend that she had played fast and loose with history: “I wanted the film to be credible but I was inspired more by the visual than historical facts. I want people to be transported into another era with an echo of today.”

Coppola, who won an Oscar for her film Lost in Translation, was inspired by a meeting with Evelyne Lever, a French authority on Marie Antoinette. Over lunch Lever mentioned the parallels between the queen’s life and Diana’s, and pointed out that in certain portraits there was a physical resemblance.

Although the film makes use of Antonia Fraser’s revisionist biography of the French queen, it takes its own path. “Sofia had her vision and I had mine,” said Fraser, whose book sought to rescue the queen’s absolutist reputation. “Yet it’s a beautifully done film and I like her vision.”

Coppola has set the historical events to a soundtrack of music from her childhood in the 1970s and the 1980s. Bands include the British punk group Siouxsie and the Banshees and Bow Wow Wow, although she also uses more contemporary techno from Richard D James and Aphex Twin.

The film stars Kirsten Dunst as the Austrian princess who comes from Vienna to marry the dauphin, played by Jason Schwartzman. Marie Antoinette became queen when she was 18 after four years of marriage. However, she remained a virgin until she was 21.

“The problem was more to do with her husband,” said Fraser. “He was undersexed and also probably couldn’t face being dominated by her sexually.”

The marriage produced three children but Marie Antoinette allegedly had an affair with Axel von Fersen, a Swedish diplomat played by Jamie Dornan in the film.

Despite the parallels between Marie Antoinette and the excesses of bling, she comes over as a rather sympathetic character. “For most French people I think it is a new vision of her,” said Olivier René Veillon, director of the Ile de France film commission.

The film, which also stars Marianne Faithfull and Steve Coogan, ends in 1789, the first year of the revolution, leaving implicit the tragic outcome.

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