The Beguiled

If Don Siegel’s 1971 film “The Beguiled”, the rare Clint Eastwood foray into erotica, where he lusted after an entire boarding school of girls and they lusted after him was seen from the perspective of its masculine star, then Sofia Coppola’s “The Beguiled” remake turns Siegel’s film inside out, rooting its point of view to the women. It also scrubs away much of the original’s vulgarity and violence for a prim, proper, almost fairytale aesthetic underlining the seminary setting where Miss Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman) tutors the young girls in her charge in the ways of being “good Christian women”, which is how the repressive era preferred their women be seen and is consequently the same lens through which Coppola shows us these seven girls. And while Coppola does eventually smear that lens, she never devolves into overheated hysteria like the 1971 film, likely because, as you can almost hear a seemly southern gentleman saying, such hysteria is unbecoming of a lady.

The story turns on eleven year old Amy (Oona Laurence) finding an injured Union soldier, Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell), and helping him back to her boarding school so his wounds can be mended. When he asks after the slaves, Amy explains they all left, a fairly conspicuous evasion of the era’s most incendiary sin. Indeed, violence and vulgarity is not all that Coppola scrubs from this version. Though not seeing these women engaged in the no doubt hard work – cleaning, cooking, tilling – that went with maintaining such an opulent residence comes across like a conscious stylistic choice to further underline the overriding importance of appearances, it also evokes the absence of those on which these white Confederate women would have relied. And while the war itself is present, with low rumbles of cannon fire on the soundtrack and smoke on the horizon, it remains distinctly, deliberately abstract as “The Beguiled” purposely jettisons politics of the War Between the States to exclusively scrutinize the War Between the Sexes. In recounting that war, Coppola is frequently successful.

McBurney, frankly, often comes across less like a soldier than a male odalisque, framed to ogle as he is propped up in bed where his leg mends. When he initially arrives, passed out cold, Miss Martha washes the dirt off his body, pausing to wring out her scrub like she might pass out, a moment which Kidman plays at a more comical pitch than sensual, like she, beacon of piety, has run up against an immovable erotic object. He, quite aware of the spell he casts, indulges in it, though with far less of the naked aggression in Siegel’s version, with Farrell cutting a courtly figure as he goes about whispering sweet nothings in each one’s individual company, making promises he never intends to keep, particularly with Edwina, who projects her desire to escape these stuffy surroundings onto this interloper. This, however, is an underwritten subplot that strangely gets the shrift in the film’s denouement, though Dunst still provides her character a credible melancholy ache and a closeted carnal desire.

His manipulations eventually give way, and when they do so does his fragile physical state which suddenly turns perilous, transforming him from manipulator into monster, though, like so many monsters, he ultimately proves more make believe. When Marie (Addison Riecke) makes the fateful suggestion for how they might be rid of their guest it is astonishing to see how it easy it comes to her, like it was hovering in the air all the while just waiting for someone to grasp it, and when Miss Martha gives it her blessing, Kidman delicately but demonically allows her character to revel in this sudden acquisition of power. And though McBurney’s comeuppance takes place in a traditionally suspenseful context, Coppola, as she does elsewhere, deliberately strips away that suspense, the capper hinging on McBurney’s own oblivious doltishness with Miss Martha’s wicked smile as the laugh track, the latter revealing the movie’s inclination to laugh at McBurney rather than be frightened by him. To that point, when McBurney gets hold of a gun and waves it around, it is born as much from desperate impotence as menace, evinced in how quickly he discards that gun when Edwina lets herself into his room and more or less throws herself at him.

Just as Coppola eliminates so much suspense, she also does away with the majority of the material’s inherent grisliness, most acutely emblemized in a shot when Miss Martha’s nightgown is streaked with blood, which elicits the air of an oil painting hanging in some musty museum where the tastefulness of the gore yearns to illustrate how the macabre and the femine are not meant to mix. The concluding shot, with the seven women gathered on the front porch, resembles a painting too, as if they are sitting for a portrait, though the portrait begins in a wide angle with the women in the distant background and McBurney in the foreground. Then the camera closes in on the women, slowly removing McBurney from the frame, and you can almost hear a seemly southern gentleman saying to himself as he passes by, “My, my, what good Christian women.”

A Movie For Our Moment (even though it might not be)

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be ‘interesting’ to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.” – Joan Didion, The White Album

Movies are just movies. They are a series of aesthetic choices made principally by a lone filmmaker in a vacuum, on set, on location, away from the quaking madness of the world, where harnessing a finished product that can speak to an audience anytime, anywhere is the end goal.

Movie trailers are not movies at all (unless you’re Michael Bay). They are two minute commercials designed to sell the final product to the widest possible audience. Ascribing any sort of meaning to them beyond your own insta-desire or dislike is a fool’s errand and beside the point.

Still, we live in extraordinary times. We live in a time when the American President is a man who boasted about sexual assault and passed it off as locker room talk. This, combined with a good ol’ boy controlled Congress getting set to hitch up its good ol’ boy britches and go after women’s rights, prompted millions of women around the country to take up protest signs and pink hats and march in the streets.

That means even though the latest Sofia Coppola Grand Appartement du Reine, a remake of Don Siegel’s “The Beguiled”, for which the first trailer just dropped yesterday, and which looks like her latest chic cauldron of atmosphere, and which stars Kirsten Dunst and Nicole Kidman which is like Steph Curry and Kevin Durant playing for the same team, is a film on which we should attempt to reserve judgment until its release date of June 23rd, well, who are we kidding? Because “The Beguiled” is a film in which a Union soldier is nursed to health by a group of women at a boarding school only to devolve (or evolve) into the group of women getting what’s theirs. Or, more accurately, it involves taking from the man what’s his, more or less makes good on Siegel’s explanation that the Thomas P. Cullinan novel on which it was based stemmed from “the basic desire of women to castrate men”.

And if the Union soldier was played by Clint Eastwood in the original, meaning he had to be the star, sort of muddling the feminist message, Sofia’s version, which seems to be bringing the women up in the mix and taking the man down, would seem more perfectly in tune to our suddenly perilous times. This is mere speculation, of course, me simply wanting a movie to be something it might not, and so feel free to lodge your complaints in the comments section. I will judge the movie for what it is when it arrives but for now please excuse me for looking through my pre-release lens and imagining it as the answer to my mournful prayers...