Sofia Coppola’s playful, punky biopic of Marie Antoinette isn’t what we’ve come to expect from history, even Hollywood history. It follows the Austrian princess from her arranged marriage to the French Dauphin Louis-Auguste, through her ascension to queen of France and subsequent reign; but it isn’t really about any of those things. Nor is it about the revolution that would follow, the controversy that surrounded her, the famous “let them eat cake line” … though all of these things get a look-in.

But mainly, like The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation before it, Coppola’s latest is about boredom. Because, while Marie Antoinette isn’t exactly filmed from the perspective of its heroine, it’s very much in sympathy with her – we’re shown just enough of the context that’s traditionally regarded as history to understand her, but no more. Rather than the politicking of Versailles or the revolution fermenting outside its walls, we get Kirsten Dunst looking bored as hell and then, in the second half, finding increasingly outlandish and expensive ways to keep herself amused amidst the cloying, ordered environs of the French court.

Coppola does this kind of thing better than anybody, and is arguably the only director who could pull it off. She’s also perhaps the only one who could use a soundtrack of eighties alternative rock (by the logic that it’s what she was listening to when she was a teenager) and for it not to seem crass or wildly inappropriate. In fact, it works well for the most part, although occasionally the whole film risks descending into an Adam Ant video.

And even though conventional ideas of history get sidelined, some salient points get made along the way. There’s something at once grotesque and beguiling about the levels of self-indulgence that the court indulge in; Coppola portrays a world of such fairytale unreality that when the angry peasants finally arrive for their slice of cake, they might as well have wandered in from another planet. She also makes a convincing argument that the worst Antoinette could be accused of is naivety; she’s so hermetically sealed from the outside world, so constantly pampered and surrounded by excess, that it’s no wonder her sense of reality is a little shaky. According to Coppola at least, she isn’t a bad person, not even completely oblivious to the plight of her people. But – as when she builds her bizarre model peasant village, or tries to preach Rousseau – she just seemly hopelessly out of touch.

It’s interesting enough, for sure, spectacular and gorgeous to look at, and Dunst gives her best performance since The Virgin Suicides. Coppola has made some bravely unorthodox decisions, and most of them have paid off. But, for all that, her third film is still a disappointment, albeit a slight one. The vignette structure that served so well in her first two films just doesn’t quite work on such a broad canvas – each scene and shot is revealing in itself, but they don’t add up to a convincing whole. And where The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation lingered in the mind long after they were over, Marie Antoinette – for whatever reason – doesn’t. Even by Coppola’s standards it’s remarkably ephemeral, and just too insubstantial to be truly satisfying.