France's tragic queen Marie Antoinette is set to reign at Cannes in a US period piece by director Sofia Coppola, which could see audiences recrown her the toast of the town.

"Marie Antoinette" is the latest film by Coppola who won an Oscar in 2004 for best original screenplay for her "Lost in Translation".

In contrast to the subtle, low-key performances of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in "Lost in Translation", Coppola's latest movie is set to be a sumptuous feast for the eyes.

Shot entirely in France and mostly in Versailles, the film traces the life of the Austrian princess who arrives aged just 14 at the court of Louis XV, where she quickly becomes lost in the court's rigid etiquette, and an unwitting victim of vicious gossip.

It is only the third feature length movie by the 35-year-old Coppola, and she has again turned to Kirsten Dunst, who she first directed at the age of 16 in the 1999 film "Virgin Suicides", to take the leading role.

In interviews, Coppola has admitted that she wrote the screenplay with Dunst in mind after reading Austrian writer Stefan Zweig's biography of Marie Antoinette, which largely sought to moderate history's view of the young queen as frivolous, weak and self-indulgent.

Marie Antoinette was beheaded at the guillotine in 1793, when she was just 37, after being arrested and jailed during the French Revolution.

She has since become a by-word for the excesses of the Versailles court, although historians say there appears to be no real evidence that she actually ever said of the starving peasants, "Let them eat cake".