Film: The Beguiled

Yeehaw. With her new feminine Southern Gothic film, The Beguiled, Sofia Coppola has returned to the form she showed in The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation.

For only the second time in its history, the Cannes Festival declared a woman to be the best director. Which is scandalous, but not, of course, Sofia Coppola’s fault. Following the disappointment of The Bling Ring, Francis Ford Coppola’s daughter has bounced back with a choreographed piece, at once elegant and sultry, for women that is alluring and misleading, but never reveals all its secrets. Her film is an adaptation of a Southern Gothic novel by Thomas P Cullinan, which inspired Don Siegel’s excellent The Beguiled back in 1971 – but the result is very different.

Towards the end of the US Civil War, the seven women in an isolated girls’ boarding school in Virginia find themselves dealing with a badly wounded Union soldier (Colin Farrell). Instead of handing him over to the Confederate army, they decide they will care for him first – officially out of Christian charity, although in reality less virtuous motives also play a part.

In Siegel’s film, the focus is on the soldier, brilliantly portrayed by the young Clint Eastwood. Coppola approaches the story from a much more interesting angle: that of the seven women, of seven different ages. The presence of the male intruder upsets the modus vivendi in the boarding school and (at last) shatters the standstill.

A whole range of longings that have been repressed for too long, troubled emotions, and newly surfacing urges is kindled. It is different for each of the women. The head, Nicole Kidman, finds a dumb stud attractive; a teacher, Kirsten Dunst, dreams of a man who will liberate her; a pupil, Elle Fanning, is determined not to miss out on this unexpected opportunity to experiment.

Coppola once again excels in the sophisticated evocation of an equivocal, many-layered atmosphere. Some humorous touches and a pinch of noir make this a highly enjoyable and original film, well worth seeing.

> The Beguiled. US, dir.: Sofia Coppola, act.: Nicole Kidman, Colin Farrell, Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning