On the heels of the Cannes Film Festival, make some popcorn, dim the lights, curl up on the couch, and follow Style.com/Arabia on a behind-the-scenes tour through your classic DVD collection.
Marie Antoinette
The incoherent, stream-of-consciousness haze of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette was saved by a lot of glorious shoes and Kirsten Dunst’s adorable dimples. Ooh la la!
Coppola’s pastel interpretation of the misunderstood, cake-loving Queen of France was influenced by two 1783 portraits painted by Marie-Louise-Élisabeth Vigée, a French Rococo artist and royal court maven. The first creation caused quite the scandal at the court because the Queen (though fully clothed by today’s standards) appeared in her lingerie. The second, more formal portrait of the Queen a la Rose smoothed over the rumor mill. One of Dunst’s costumes replicates this satin blue gown, and the entire film is saturated in pink rose petals.
The Dark Knight
You may be surprised to learn that Christopher Nolan, director of the epic that brought Batman back to life, is actually a huge fan of the late artist Francis Bacon, an extraordinary talent known for his shadowy figurative paintings. It turns out that while playing the Joker, Heath Ledger’s makeup was actually a nod to Francis Bacon’s style. In an interview with the TATE Modern museum in London, Nolan explained, “We were trying to find a way to take clown makeup and make it more threatening somehow. I would up taking a book of Francis Bacon paintings and showing [the makeup artist] how the paint would run together and the colors would mix.” To the Batmobile!
The Shining
If your mom let you stay up late to watch The Shining when you were a kid, you were probably too terrified to sleep afterwards. In one particularly creepy scene, a set of twins holds hands and stares blankly into the camera. There is a strong resemblance between the girls and another set of twins captured in an iconic image captured by American photographer Diane Arbus (1922-1971). The haunting photograph, entitled Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967, has been the subject of much debate and is often referenced by photography buffs. Director Stanley Kubrick crossed paths with Arbus while they were working for the same magazine and it’s highly likely that her famous photograph influenced him in some way.
Mean Streets
The legendary Martin Scorsese’s early biopic Mean Streets tells the story of a gangster named Charlie and the sins he commits on the hard city streets. Strangely enough, the director was deeply moved by The Calling of St. Matthew, a painting by the baroque Italian master Caravaggio, (1571-1610). What is remarkable about the painting is how realistic the people appear, gathered around a table in a bar; several centuries later, it still feels perfectly plausible to step into their world. Regarding his relationship with Caravaggio, Scorsese once told The Guardian, “He sort of pervaded the entirety of the bar sequences in Mean Streets. He was there in the way I wanted the camera movement, the choice of how to stage a scene. It’s basically people sitting in bars, people at tables, people getting up. The Calling of St Matthew, but in New York!”
By Danna Lorch
