Call it historically inaccurate, call it irresponsible, but the last thing Marie Antoinette can be called is a stodgy historical play-by-play.

Instead, it’s a quietly sad story that, like director Sofia Coppola’s lovely Lost in Translation, looks at a young woman — a wife at 14 and an executed icon of France’s old regime at 37 — who must grow accustomed to being a stranger in her own life.

But Marie Antoinette didn’t choose the life she led, and that is the heart of Coppola’s movie. The film’s first scenes show a young girl who still sleeps with her puppy at night being whisked away from her home in Austria to become a pawn in an act of 18th century international diplomacy.

Kirsten Dunst plays the title character with a careful mix of bewilderment, eagerness and innocence. She enters the halls of France’s palace of Versailles, adjusting to life with a new husband — the future Louis XVI (Rushmore’s Jason Schwartzman) — but scoffing at age-old royal traditions that she views with jaded bemusement.

That mood reigns supreme, and Coppola develops the movie’s tone and style through it. Marie Antoinette has an effervescent ’80s pop soundtrack (with a welcome dose of The Strokes), but at the same time a wistful piano score and Lance Acord’s gorgeous cinematography can make the vast gardens and endless hallways of Versailles feel less like a palace and more like a prison.

In Coppola’s rendering of the famous queen’s life, that change could have happened at any moment. Much of the film concentrates on the scorn Marie faced in the several years her marriage remained unconsummated.

In the film’s best scenes, however, she turns Versailles into a playground, her heedless decadence stretching until sunrise.

Coppola is such a master of mood that sometimes she doesn’t know where to stop, and she can take the movie’s pace from deliberate to glacial. Just as in The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation, the style can overwhelm the substance.

Somehow, though, Coppola still creates characters that ring true. Marie’s relationship with Louis XVI carries a tone of mutual respect and affection that is surprisingly touching, and the movie’s final scenes — when the French Revolution comes to the gates of Versailles — are wrenching.

Other historical epics about this turning point in modern history might be more accurate and less stylized, but Marie Antoinette is the first movie of its kind in a long time that makes its characters feel like more than dots on a timeline. And mon dieu, it’s beautiful.