Versailles 20 Years After Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette": Milena Canonero's Oscar-Winning Costumes on Show at the Petit Trianon Until 24 January 2027

Twenty years ago Sofia Coppola brought Marie Antoinette to Versailles, with Kirsten Dunst in the lead role, Jason Schwartzman as Louis XVI and a soundtrack featuring New Order and The Strokes. The film was booed at its Cannes screening. Today the same film has an exhibition in the palace itself - and in the very place the queen loved most.

The exhibition is simply called "Marie Antoinette" and is housed in the Petit Trianon, the château where the queen escaped the suffocating court etiquette. Visitors go behind the scenes of the shoot: original costumes by Milena Canonero, who won the Oscar for costume design for this film, props from the set, storyboards, scripts with notes in the margins, unpublished photos and pieces of the set design. What makes it special is that you walk through the rooms while scenes filmed in those very rooms play on the walls. The exhibition runs until 24 January 2027, and tickets are sold through the palace's official website.

Around the Petit Trianon lies the whole world of the queen who liked to play at being a peasant: the gardens, the Temple of Love and the Queen's Hamlet, a fake village with cottages where the queen acted out rural life in a country where bread was already a luxury for many. The Trianon estate ticket covers both Trianons, the gardens, the Hamlet and temporary exhibitions, so it's best to set aside a whole morning for this.

The afternoon belongs to the main palace of Versailles. The gardens were designed by André Le Nôtre and are now UNESCO-protected: more than 50 fountains across around 800 hectares, with the cross-shaped Grand Canal 1,500 metres long and 62 metres wide. Inside awaits the Hall of Mirrors, built between 1678 and 1684, with 357 mirrors. The peace treaty after the First World War was signed in that same hall - a war the Balkans paid for with hundreds of thousands of lives, and whose end was sealed among the Sun King's chandeliers.

For lunch, inside the palace itself, Alain Ducasse's restaurant operates in the Pavillon Dufour - booking is recommended, because Versailles is not a place for improvising. If you get a sweet craving, Ladurée has its own shop in the palace. The irony is hard to miss: at the place linked to the queen credited with the line "let them eat cake", cakes are sold today at European prices. Historians have long said Marie Antoinette most likely never said that line, but the legend sells better than the footnote.

The easiest way to get to Versailles from Paris is the RER C suburban train to Versailles Château - Rive Gauche station, about a ten-minute walk from the palace. Trains from Montparnasse and Saint-Lazare go to the other two Versailles stations.

The Coppola exhibition also carries a subconscious message. The film portrayed Marie Antoinette as a teenager lost in a foreign country, buried under cakes, shoes and protocol, not as a textbook monster. Versailles now embraces that version and displays it in its own halls. Whether that's a reconciliation with history or just another way for the palace to sell a ticket - decide for yourself, preferably with a cake in hand.