Her execution in my mind would have been more fulfilling to show her as a person who was a victim of her situation, rather than showing her fleeing in a carriage to another palace.
Actually, Marie-Antoinette was less a victim of her situation than she was of her birth. She would have made a charming sovereign for some Italian duchy but her temperament was ill suited to make her Queen of one of the most powerful nations on earth. Her upbringing in the comparatively laid back court at Schonbrunn also didn't prepare her for the tightly laced and highly necessary protocol at Versailles. It was this more than anything that led to her downfall as it was the nobles, not the fishwives of Paris, who first and continually used the epithet "L'Autrichienne" to refer to her, not only because they distrusted anyone Austrian (which they did) but because she disregarded the protocol at the palace so carefully put in place by Louis XIV to contain the nobles and the disruption of which cost many of them lucrative positions. Simply put she didn't understand the French court and it mattered less that she didn't think of the people than the fact that she didn't understand the nobility. Her and her husband's path to the Place de la Révolution can be traced directly back to the gilded halls of Versailles.
As for showing her execution, there was no need for that. The Marie-Antoinette portrayed in the film was never portrayed as anything less than gracious, which she was and which her words to Sanson only buttress. Besides, the film wasn't really about the entire life of Marie-Antoinette. It was about the earlier years of a young woman terribly unsuited to her position seen through the eyes of that same young woman. She is naive and completely unaware that anything exists outside her golden palaces, unaware of the storm her actions are helping to create, caring only for her own pursuits and pleasures and bucking at the traces which held Versailles, and the French monarchy, together.
"Nothing is more ill bred than trying to steal the affections of someone else's dog."
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