The Beguiled review – woozy does it | Film
Thomas Cullinan’s 1966 novel The Beguiled (AKA A Painted Devil), about a wounded Union soldier taken into a southern girls’ academy during the US civil war, was first brought to the screen by director Don Siegel in 1971. With posters declaring that leading man Clint Eastwood “has never been in a deadlier spot!â€, Siegel’s film was a horror-inflected psychodrama, full of sinewy interior monologues, and foreshadowing some of the male paranoia themes of Eastwood’s directorial debut Play Misty for Me. Now, writer-director Sofia Coppola revisits this story with a sly, sensuous adaptation that earned her the best director award at Cannes, making her the first woman to take that prize since Yuliya Solntseva won for Chronicle of Flaming Years in 1961. Despite closely mirroring the narrative of Siegel’s film (the screenplay of which is acknowledged alongside Cullinan’s nove l), Coppola’s version could not be more tonally different, as she sets about “retelling the story from the women’s point of viewâ€.
Colin Farrell is Corporal John McBurney, who is found wounded in the Virginia woods by schoolgirl Amy (Oona Laurence) and brought to the mansion of Miss Martha Farnsworth’s Seminary for Young Ladies. The injured soldier arouses breathless excitation among the ladies, disrupting their circumspect roundelay of French lessons, prayer, and music practice, provoking giddy chatter about “blue-bellies†coming at night to “raid our gardenâ€. Under the guise of Christian charity, the haughty Miss Martha (Nicole Kidman) tends to McBurney’s wounds while her housemates vie for his affections. “You are not a guest,†insists Martha, “and we are not here to entertain youâ€, although for a while the corporal seems to have his hosts under his spell. But just who is beguiling whom?
From the opening shots, in which cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd’s old-fashioned frame (1.66 ratio on 35mm stock) is filled with dappled light and gauzy lens-flare, Coppola evokes the woozy, dreamy milieu that has long been her trademark. While Siegel may have alluded to this story’s fairytale undertones, Coppola puts them to the fore, reducing the war itself to the sound of distant cannon fire. As with The Virgin Suicides, these young women share a cloistered environment that has become their entire world. But there are monsters here too, with darkening evocations of Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, and perhaps even Carol Morley’s The Falling gradually fracturing the genteel surface.
It’s easy to understand why Coppola chose to excise some of the more lurid elements (flashbacks to incest and rape, hallucinatory threesomes, overt child abuse), which lent a B-movie exploitation edge to Siegel’s film. More perplexing is the removal of a key character in Cullinan’s novel, an enslaved black woman named Mattie. Renamed Hallie in the 1971 film (and powerfully played by Mae Mercer), she had the measure of Geraldine Page’s twisted Miss Martha and Eastwood’s slippery McBurney, providing scathing sociopolitical commentary (“white man’s the same everywhere in this worldâ€) on the battles raging both inside and outside the house. Yet for all the production-design attention to period detail, Coppola’s film seems to exist in a timeless limbo (Siegel’s arresting images of war are entirely absent), throwing us back to the court of her Marie Antoinette and forward to the bad girls of The Bling Ring in a manner more haun ted than historical.
While Kidman’s southern accent wobbles a little, her performance is surefooted and finely nuanced. Farrell negotiates McBurney’s shifts from sly charm to emasculated anger with ease, while Elle Fanning (who co-starred in Coppola’s Somewhere) fizzes with untamed energy as the flirtatious Alicia. Coppola regular Kirsten Dunst plays the habitually disappointed Edwina with a downcast gaze, suggesting deep wells of melancholia stirred by wistful desire. A dinner-table scene in which the jealous Martha subtly reins in Edwina’s dawning self-confidence is a masterclass in candle-lit understatement.
While long lenses place these characters deep within the lush landscape in the exterior shots, shallow-focus closeups evoke skin-prickling responses indoors. Sparse incidental music intertwines with plaintive bursts of song, while nature provides an incessant background thrum.
“There is nothing more frightening than a startled woman with a gun,†reports Miss Martha, but it’s the perverse unity of this disarmingly disparate group that packs the real punch. Fans of Siegel’s film may bridle at Coppola’s reinterpretation, but those who have swooned at Coppola’s distinctive back catalogue will find themselves right at home.
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