#256: The Beguiled
Release Date: June 23rd, 2017
Format: Blu-ray Written by: Sofia Coppola Directed by: Sofia Coppola 4 Stars
Released at the threshold of the global MeToo movement, Sofia Coppola’s 2017 film The Beguiled is a re-telling of director Don Siegel’s similarly titled 1971 film, starring Clint Eastwood.
Coppola shifts her version of the story to a female perspective, about a small girls’ school in Virginia during the Civil War, who take in an injured Union soldier and nurse him back to health (that is, until tragedy strikes).
Although told from the female perspective, I don’t get the sense that Coppola is strictly interested in feminist aims. She seems just as interested in biological human attraction and how it conflicted with proper Christian, southern values of the 19th century. For example, once taken in, this handsome Union soldier (Colin Farrell) quickly becomes a sort of idol within the all-girls’ school: The youngest children (Oona Laurence, Angourie Rice, Addison Riecke, and Emma Howard) can’t help but giggle when they’re around him, this charming and polite soldier who likes listening in on their music recitals and hearing tales about their small woodland pets; an older teenage student (Elle Fanning) has a more carnal interest in the soldier, and wants to win his attraction with smoldering looks and stolen kisses; a teacher (Kirsten Dunst) envisions a romance with the Yankee after she’s won over by his proclamations of love; and the school’s headmistress (Nicole Kidman) can’t help but let down her guard and daydream about a male partner to grow old with, to share a brandy with at the end of the evening.
Coppola presents these behaviors and feelings as naturalistic human instincts that happen to conflict with the rigid mores of the time. Her use of the camera is also naturalistic; we feel like we’re in this house with these women, and when one shares a glance with the injured soldier, we see the subtle reaction of another character in the room, and how she may look to a third character to see if she saw it too. It’s wonderful to watch.
Most of the film is spent in this quietude, where the women are enjoying the company of this man even though they would never admit to it or are in denial of it.
Ultimately they are punished for their sins with a tragedy that threatens their very well-being. Here Coppola replaces a mood of quiet repression with straight southern gothic horror. The Union soldier, it turns out, had been following his own strict social mores for most of the movie, that is, until he starts taking exactly what he wants, and who he wants, in the house.
He is a man, after all, Coppola shows.
It’s up to the women to unify their strength and deal with this raging Yankee, even if it means once again abandoning their Christian values. They made their deal with the devil by taking him in and entertaining sinful thoughts, and now the devil’s work is the only way out.
