This autumn, a unique event is taking place in the Petit Trianon, the small summer house tucked among the formal flowerbeds of the sprawling Château de Versailles estate.

Walking through its rooms, visitors can admire bold pink floral arrangements while listening to music by New Order. It’s been created in homage to Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film, Marie Antoinette.

The film, shot on location at Versailles, is being thrown an extraordinary 20th birthday party. Scenes and sets have been recreated in the very rooms where the teenage queen (played in the film by Kirsten Dunst) once escaped the rigid hierarchies of court life.

In this mingling of fact and fantasy, visitors encounter Marie Antoinette’s real Sèvres dinner service. Alongside it are the elaborate food props created for Coppola’s film by art director Anne Seibel and Michelin-starred chef Marc Meneau. Portraits of Marie Antoinette by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun hang alongside mannequins styled to resemble Dunst.

More than 200 films have been shot on location in and around the buildings and grounds of Versailles, but this is the first exhibition dedicated to a single film.

Coppola worked with curators Laurent Salomé and Hélène Delalex on the exhibition’s artistic conception. The result is an extraordinary and uncanny experience: the Petit Trianon filtered through the dual sensibilities of filmmaker and queen.

Here, visitors see with particular clarity how both women constructed cloistered worlds designed to........

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