Sofia Coppola’s six films to date have all considered deprivation from a roundabout perspective, swaddled in the lap of luxury, detailing how acute instances of isolation and dislocation can fester even within the embrace of otherwise all-encompassing privilege. This career-long examination has largely played out in a female-focused context, surveying the changes which occur within small clusters of sheltered girlhood, the already-fraught passage from innocence to maturity further complicated by pressing external concerns. Reaching back to the dreamy melancholia of The Virgin Suicides, The Beguiled returns this scenario to a setting with one foot in the real world, the other poised on a mystical fairy-tale plane, once again charting the cracks which form after the appearance of a male gaze inside a formerly cloistered world of women. This occurs within a rich, Civil War-set slice of Southern Gothic, detailing the fallout that follows a hunk of damaged manhood being deposited within the secluded world of a rural Virginia girls’ school.
The film opens with the pronounced patter of feet, the sound of a young girl’s shoes on gravel forming a rough rhythm with cannon booms ringing out in the near distance. The scene has an air of Red Riding Hood-esque menace, which persists as the child flits about the forest gathering stands of suspiciously phallic-looking mushrooms, before stumbling upon a man’s frame slung out amid the underbrush. This is Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell) a wounded Union deserter with a leg full of shrapnel, whose presence here functions as a kind of Mephistophelean manifestation of the alluring menace of natural world, imposing itself upon a figure of unwitting innocence. Carried back to the school, its inhabitants whittled down to a skeleton crew of teachers and students due to the war’s proximity just outside the gates, he triggers a variety of different reactions, provoking the suspicion of wary headmistress Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman) while piquing the interest of many of the younger students.
Laid up in the music room, the soldier at first seems like a placid, life-giving presence, adding a spark of wit and some much needed variety to the strained wartime atmosphere. In time, however, he’ll function as his own form of fungus, spreading out spores of jealousy and distrust. Desperate to prevent himself from being sent to a Confederate prison, he engages in a sly charm offensive, attempting to enrapture the ladies by playing on their individual insecurities. Befitting the fantastical realm in which the story is set – a mist-swathed plantation house ringed with Spanish moss and weeping willows – this process provokes a harsh movement from reverie to reality, one that never entirely robs the film of its fantastical edge.
Bathed, shaved and clad in white cotton, McBurney becomes the model of the perfect gentleman, dispensing gracious good humor from the comfort of a converted fainting couch. He promises devotion to the timid, circumspect Edwina (Kirsten Dunst), draws in the animal-loving Amy (Oona Laurence) who originally found him in the woods, and throws sparks on the hormonal kindling of 17-year-old Alicia (Elle Fanning). Yet the sweet-talking Irishman’s decorum is merely ornamental drapery over a greater will to survive, a desire that, when challenged, quickly reveals the brutish dark side lurking beneath the veneer of male chivalry.
As constructed by Coppola, this compressed chamber drama stands in sharp contrast to the macho ill temper found in Don Siegel’s 1971 version of Thomas Cullinan’s 1966 novel, where a half-hearted attempt to manifest the looming threat of toxic masculinity is undercut by a dark streak of spiteful misogyny. There, a crow cruelly chained to a railing, and the ridiculous sight of Clint Eastwood in a floor-length nightshirt, asserted domesticity as a prison endured by men for the sake of comfort, one which denied their natural free-roaming impulses and could easily lead to total self-erasure. Shifted to a female perspective, this telling transforms the story into a bracing parable of power and deception, mirroring the tumultuous passage from adolescence into adulthood via the increasingly malevolent presence of a sharp-tongued serpent.
Like much of Coppola’s previous work, The Beguiled uses a familiar structure and setting to access new aspects of old stories, playing off demure plantation stereotypes to both explore and challenge an idea of delicate female fragility. Contrary to the strutting, rakish aggression of Siegel’s version, where McBurney’s appearance inspires formerly barren hens to start hatching again, here fecundity is inextricably tied to femininity. Instead of a somewhat deserving victim, the interloping man becomes the snake in the garden, one who proposes to trim the weeds but transforms into something far more beastly once a part of him is culled. Through a mix of natural and theatrical lighting, soft fabrics and hard wood, placid birdsong and thudding violence, the film achieves something remarkable, spinning out a story of war, desperation and murder without ever cracking its genteel, perfectly polished exterior.
The post The Beguiled appeared first on Spectrum Culture.