Written and Directed by Sofia Coppola
Based on the 1966 novel by Thomas P. Cullinan
If you’re
looking for a Hollywood movie to see, Sofia Coppola’s new film The Beguiled is not that. And if you’re
interested in comparing her remake of Don Siegel’s 1971 movie starring Clint
Eastwood, search other reviews.
Quite a lot spellbinds in Coppola’s Beguiled, the word itself having
multiple meanings for the film. Like Terence Davies’ A Quiet Passion about Emily Dickinson, Coppola’s work studies human
character and psychology, employing a textured, historic setting, full of
detail—a female world, cloistered and gated. Although the time is the third
year of the Civil War and the location a plantation house built with the
traditional front columns of the ruling class, the war is not the story.
Instead, it provides a framework for why the finishing school that now occupies
the mansion has only five girls remaining. Miss Martha Farnsworth (Nicole
Kidman), daughter of the former plantation owner, runs Miss Farnsworth’s
Seminary for Young Ladies, with the help of an assistant, Miss Edwina (Kirsten
Dunst). Each of the five girls still at the school has a character role in the
film, most notably Miss Alicia (Elle Fanning), a sexually hot teenager with a
contemptuous personality, and Miss Amy (Oona Laurence), an eleven-year-old scholarly
type with long, straight braids. All of the other women, except for their leader Miss
Martha, wear elaborately braided hair and dress impeccably, their exquisite gowns
sewed, laundered, and pressed at one time by slaves, who have since fled the Virginia
homestead. Dress, manners, comportment are one of the “character studies” in
the film—upper-class Southern women during the slave era. They curtsy when
they greet someone, they speak with cultured articulation, and they learn the skills
for their future as privileged women and wives: quiet handiwork, a smattering
of French, music, and elegant dining-room etiquette. We see how they’re raised
toward a perfection in femininity, like goddesses; their ladylike achievement
is already established in childhood, but it also confines them, stifles them.
The next study, and related to the
girls’ polite veneer, is their natural sexual drive for a man. And when a handsome
man arrives to their cloistered world, all of them—from Martha with her aging
face to the youngest girl—seek approbation from the lone man under their roof,
Union soldier, Cpl. John McBurney (Colin Farrell), an Irish mercenary. He is
the enemy, but being good Samaritans the women must treat his badly wounded leg
and let him convalesce before turning him over to the Confederates. We see by
their magnetism to him that they also make excuses for keeping him longer.
Their innate female biology drives them to dress up for him, flirt, charm, and allure
him. The three eldest vie to sleep with him.
The next study Coppola offers us is
Cpl. McBurney and how from the start he warmly personalizes each interaction
with the women so that they won’t turn him over to the Confederates. He’s a
talented manipulator with his gentle, solicitous Irish brogue, but wouldn’t his
behavior be the same for any of us caught inside an enemy camp? This enemy camp
happens to be all-female with femininity at its most cultivated state, so his
wiles work in that direction. And he easily succeeds because other forces are
helping him, namely the women’s natural pursuit of a desirable man. The
tingling of this male-female dynamic permeates each scene like erotic vapors.
Here the title looms most, for the word beguile has several meanings: to charm,
enchant, sometimes in a deceptive way, to seduce, to trick, and, in older
usage, to help pass the time pleasantly. Beyond these meanings in the film, the
movie’s otherworldly, strangely ghostly aura—the eerie forest of Hansel and
Gretel—beguiles the audience. Credit for this atmosphere goes to Coppola’s sense
of texture and Philippe Le Sourd’s cinematography.
The
strongest character in the movie is Miss Edwina, whose sad, detached face and resignation
to her female lot convey a real person, whereas the other women in the story play
their roles. Cpl. McBurney, though also a role, has a real moment when he loses
his wounded leg. His violent reaction, his anguish and thrashing madness at the
women’s treachery, show us a true reaction to a horrific occurrence. Like the
women imprisoned by their chauvinistic society, McBurney is agonizingly trapped
in his ruined life.
A
brilliant twist occurs at the end of the second act and transforms the quiet
sobriety and simmering sexuality of the movie into a gruesome realm, already set-up by the story’s ethereal, fairy-book atmosphere. Horror seamlessly creeps in,
and the change in the girls’ personalities from angels to witches is a wonderful stroke. Our
gracious Southern hostesses seated around the formal dining table in their
beautifully crafted dresses and discreet jewelry, behave demurely as they serve
Cpl. McBurney poisonous mushrooms. Miss Martha’s gleaming eye and gloating smile
as she meets her enemy’s eye when his choking death
throes begin, couldn’t be more sinister. Her formerly aging, pretty face is now
pinched and wicked, like Dracula, the mouth suggesting a drip of blood.
We
leave the theater full of thoughts, always the sign of a good movie. The
study of women’s nature when their sexuality kindles raises questions: What if McBurney
had been a Confederate soldier instead of a Yankee? Would the women have
revenged so cruelly his deceptions with them? Was amputation really necessary
or the result of Miss Martha’s wounded vanity? The creepy mood of the last act suggests the
latter; attraction had turned to enmity, with shocking consequences.
More questions arise: What happens when several women vie for the same man?
Disaster, evil. Why was Cpl. McBurney so dumb as to sneak into one of the
women’s rooms wearing shoes and tapping his cane, so that everyone else in the
house could hear his movements, bringing on the crisis? How ironic that this Irishman
made his way to the New World for a better life and because of dire
need joined the Union Army only to have his life destroyed. And
finally, what genre is this movie—highbrow horror along the lines of Robert
Eggers’s The Witch, with its subtitle
A New England Folktale? Whatever its
classification, an artist has made it and with a beguiling aesthetic.
