Marie Antoinette

I thought the first two-thirds of the film were fantastic, yet it felt to me like the last third was a bit weak. It seemed like Coppola was asking us to sympathize with the bourgeoisie in the last third, which feels like an odd direction to go in given that the first two-thirds were critiquing bourgeois ideology. I thought the last third should have naturally and logically continued with that critique, rather than awkwardly pivot toward eliciting the viewer's sympathy.
---
The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan explores the relationship between sex, desire, feminism, patriarchy, and power. Among the many illuminating lines from book, this one in particular resonates with what I found so enthralling about the first two-thirds of the film (and what I felt was lost later on). As she comments on Ellen Willis' paper, "Lust Horizons: Is the Women's Movement Pro-Sex?", Srinivasan says:

"Here, she tells us, is a task for feminism: to treat as axiomatic our free sexual choices, while also seeing why, as ‘anti-sex’ and lesbian feminists have always said, such choices, under patriarchy, are rarely free." (pg. 84)

That dialectic, between, on the one hand, maintaining a liberatory and unconstrained posture toward sex, and, on the other, the idea that sex itself has been deeply indexed, redefined, and warped through patriarchy, is very aptly interrogated at the beginning of this film.