Maybe because it’s like watching a gymnast walking a greased balance beam between challenge and disaster. When Columbia Pictures announced Sofia Coppola’s follow up film to “Lost in Translation” would be “Marie Antoinette,” Google search results for the project literally went from one Brazilian report in the morning to 11 pages in every language from English to Polish by workday’s end.

Marie Antoinette was beheaded in 1793, in what some historians frame as a precursor to the French Revolution. The same critics who believe conspiracy theories that the Academy Award winning screenwriter and director was guided by her former husband, Spike Jonze, on “Translation” think tackling such a well known, historical story may end up cutting short the career of this member of Hollywood royalty.

Singer Marianne Faithful being cast makes complete sense. But most blogging focused on casting of Kristin Dunst as Antoinette herself, Jason Schwartzman as Antoinette’s husband, and Molly Shannon as Aunt Victorie. Finally, in what seems like something straight out of Will Farrell’s parody of James Lipton, Rip Torn plays King Louis XV.

With such a cast and recalling Coppola’s super-stylistic “Virgin Suicides”, one can easily imagine an out-of-body, out-of-time dialogue like this:

Marie: (switching between British, French and American accent)

So, you’re like, joking. That thing, is like, really gonna cut my head off?

I’ll get Amnesty International after you!

Executioner:

Madam, human rights are not even a concept yet.

Victorie:

Supastah!

Lady Antonia Fraser’s historical account of Antoinette’s life provided the text for Coppola’s screenplay. But how close Coppola will stick to giving her fans a Merchant Ivory rendition of France on the precipice of Revolution is anyone’s guess. “Virgin Suicides” made very deliberate changes to the book’s setting in the old money Detroit suburb Grosse Pointe. Instead of using locations recalling the grand, neo-Victorian setting where the book takes place like Chicago’s serene North Shore, Coppola placed “Suicides” in the yellowing, Kodak instamatic aesthetics of a banal suburbia.

The five boroughs that make up secluded, exclusive Grosse Pointe have been anything but friendly to Hollywood when projects have wanted to shoot there. The career turning vehicle for John Cusak’s New Crime Theater, “Grosse Point Blank” was told “no” and “proms don’t happen in school gym’s anyway.”

Whether or not that refusal played a role in changing the aesthetics for Coppola’s director of photography, it set a tone for her career. Some commentators think her reach with this historical biopic is to cohere her detached visual sensibility with the script written in the same manner. Lance Acord, who was director of photography on “Translation,” returns for the 11-week shoot in France.

The film version of “Virgin Suicides” twisted the book to make the unfortunate endings of the sisters seem like necessary and inevitable escapes, not tragedies. This lends to the possibility Coppola could be wildly successful in retelling Antoinette’s well known tale.

At the same time, 11 weeks seems like an awfully short time to construct a celluloid recreation of the court of Versailles.

Columbia announced the film going into pre-production March 8th, but the debate was heated up by the director’s appearance at Paris fashion shows this week and reported meetings with designers hired to handle costuming. Victoire de Castellene, head jewelry designer for House of Dior, Mathilde Agostinelli, head of PR for Prada, France and the name most recognizable to part-time fashionistas, Gilles Dufour, round out the art direction team.

There are things that argue in Coppola’s favor for this project. Shannon recently turned a role in downbeat Kenneth Lonergan’s “True to You” at the Tribecca Theater Festival.

University of Wisconsin Communication Arts PhD dissertator and mentor to budding filmmakers, Rebecca Swender, is optimistic about “Antoinette.”

“I think the “Virgin Suicides” is a fine film with a lot of style,” Swender said “I look forward to seeing how she develops as a director as she continues to get older and continues to make films.”