THE BEGUILED C+
USA (93 mi)
2017 d: Sofia Coppola Official
Facebook
Ostensibly a remake
or retelling of an early Clint Eastwood film directed by Don Siegel, The
Beguiled (1971), that rare Eastwood
movie where he actually gets his comeuppance, and from none other than stage
icon Geraldine Page, though one would think this is more heavily influenced by
the gorgeously stylized Peter Weir film Picnic
at Hanging Rock (1975), one of the most spectacularly beautiful films ever
made, described as a turn of the century costume drama about the heavily
repressed world of girls at a boarding school, “a magnificently sensuous and
stunningly visualized film balancing the beauty of young innocent girls against
the beauty of nature, which seems to be so beguiling on the outside, green and
yellow flora, pastel colored flowers contrasted against the repression of the
Victorian era and the unseen, inexplicable and savage side of nature where
terror lurks underneath the surface, and where the two seem worlds apart.” Weir’s film is the same cloistered territory
Sofia Coppola enters with her new film, finding the sexually repressed secrets
that lie buried under the surface of her socially isolated Southern belles,
offering a sharp contrast to the lurid beauty of the Gothic Expressionism in
the plantation era of the South during the Civil War. The lack of a contemporary musical soundtrack
is perhaps the biggest departure from Coppola’s earlier work, while also
missing is the non-narrative, stream-of-conscious experimental style she is
known for, usually finding gentler pleasures in subtleties and poetic
tonalities. But the film works in
another way as well, though perhaps inadvertently. In an era of Trump, by ignoring historical
realities altogether, Coppola has made the ultimate film about white privilege,
and done so by throwing out any hint of slavery from the storyline, a conscious
effort on Coppola’s part, claiming she didn’t want to treat the subject
lightly, suggesting her take was about the gender dynamics of the Confederacy,
not the racial ones (Sofia
Coppola Says “The Beguiled” Is About The Gender Dynamics Of ...), despite the
overt presence of a slave character in both the book it was adapted from, a
novel written by Thomas P. Cullinan in 1966, and the previous film, where
a slave named Hallie (Mae Mercer) is charged with caring for Eastwood as he
heals from a serious injury, and is perhaps the only one not dazzled by his
erotic charms, realizing whatever status or privilege available to the other
women are not offered to her. By simply
excising the existence of slaves from the story, Coppola has done exactly what
Trump has done, cater exclusively to a white audience. While it may be a major misstep on her part,
it feeds into the criticism that she can only make films about the white
experience, where nothing that she offers speaks to people of color. In setting the film during the Civil War,
this just feels like a huge limitation on her part, though it may actually
reflect the state of mind of Southern whites living in that era, who viewed
slaves as property, as something less than human, yet ironically this class
advantage reserved for whites was totally dependent upon a slavery system of
free labor that remained the foundation of their very existence. It would be so much more “beguiling” had the
director actually dealt with this issue in some prominent fashion rather than
to simply ignore it altogether, but to do so really speaks of her own white
privilege.
That being said,
this is easily Ms. Coppola’s least challenging and most conventional effort,
suggesting this will likely pave the way for her biggest commercial success,
though it is arguably among her weakest efforts, despite having its premiere at
Cannes, with Coppola strangely and mysteriously winning the award for Best
Director, only the second female director to win the prize in the festival’s
70-year history, the only other being Soviet filmmaker Yuliya Solntseva in 1961
for THE CHRONICLE OF FLAMING YEARS. The
last time Coppola competed for the Palme d’Or was in 2006 with MARIE ANTOINETTE
when she was famously booed off the stage.
While Cannes juries have been suspect in their choices lately, ignoring
Maren Ade’s hilarious and remarkably inventive German tragi-comedy Toni
Erdmann (2016) in the previous year in favor of Ken Loach’s utterly
conventional I,
Daniel Blake (2016). It appears that
jury blew the chance to highlight a leading female director whose bold film and
unorthodox direction was head and shoulders above the others, so the next year,
perhaps guilt-ridden for slighting women through the years, they pick one of
the three women with films in competition, but picked the wrong woman, as Lynne
Ramsay was the better choice with her film YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE (2017),
receiving a 7-minute standing ovation, with critics particularly lauding her
direction, but she was instead awarded Best Screenplay, with lead actor Joaquin
Phoenix winning Best Actor. Little of
this actually makes any sense. Coppola’s
film is to be commended for the gorgeous stylization of Southern Gothic, with
cinematographer Philippe Le Lourd the real stand-out for capturing the
picturesque look, creating an interior mood using only candlelight, recalling
Kubrick’s BARRY LYNDON (1975), but the film fails to address why she chose to
remake the earlier film, as it is questionable whether she actually improves
upon the original, and one would have to think it doesn’t. Siegel’s film is about sexual hysteria,
accenting the swirling melodrama that exists when a wounded Union soldier
recovers from his wounds in a Confederate all-girl school, where he flirts and
stokes the flame of their repressed sexual desires, making them all swoon at
the very sight of having a man on the premises.
While Siegel’s film depicts the point of view of Eastwood’s easy charm
and male bravado, it doesn’t in the least slight the women’s point of view, or
the slave for that matter, as the film is really a battle of the sexes, where
the drama comes to a head when both positions are challenged. Coppola’s film lacks that balance, and
instead depicts the story purely from a woman’s view, where it’s actually more
comical, surprisingly, but lacks the physical brutality, exaggerated delirium,
and depth of performance in the original, both male and female, as who can
match the towering power of the great Geraldine Page, who is at her most
devious in the role when confronting Eastwood.
Coppola’s film doesn’t really hold a candle to the original, largely due
to its own timidity and lack of spark between Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell,
though it is immaculately photographed.
With much of this
playing out like a fairy tale, Coppola has chosen to bathe her film in a soft
light, actually resembling the look of old, faded photographs, with the sound
of gunshots and explosions continually heard off in the distance. Set in Virginia during the Civil War, with
12-year old Amy (Oona Laurence), a young girl alone in the woods searching for
mushrooms, this could be a variation of Goldilocks
and the Three Bears, as she quickly encounters the metaphorical wolf in
Colin Farrell, Corporal John McBurney, a wounded Union soldier bleeding
profusely from a gunshot wound in his leg, where she helps walk him to the
sanctuary of the Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies, an all-girls boarding
school run by Miss Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman, whose lurid backstory is
also omitted). Once safely inside, he
becomes a curiosity, with all eyes gazing upon him as if descended from the
celestial skies, where each seems wrapped in their own internalized fantasy of
how they see this man. Some of the
youngest think to turn him over to the nearby Confederate soldiers, but the two
older girls, Edwina (Kirsten Dunst), their meek and dutiful instructor,
isolated and alone, like a bird in a gilded cage, perhaps seeing a man for the
first time in her life, and an overly coquettish teenager Alicia (Elle
Fanning), not to mention Miss Martha herself, seem smitten by having a male
presence, deciding to mend his wounds while nursing him back to health,
scrubbing his body herself while declaring his room “off-limits” to the six
girls residing there. But this doesn’t
stop each one from secretly paying the corporal a visit, where he delights in
charming each and every one. While Miss
Martha is all convention and formality, representative of the manners practiced
by the overly protected Southern belles, she treats the prisoner with all due
respect, even offering him wine and pleasant company after dinner, failing to
mention his presence to the passing soldiers that look in on them from time to
time, as they themselves are in need of protection during wartime, asking
instead if one of them might share some ammunition for a pistol she keeps
handy. What follows is a comic
choreography of repressed sexual curiosity, rotating between the three oldest
women, but sometimes the youngest as well, with each one thinking he is paying
them the most attention. This rivalry,
however, leads to bickering and backstabbing, with each apparently figuring to
win the handsome prince for themselves.
Once his health improves, however, Miss Martha sets a deadline, forcing
him to make his own way, letting him go with no designs of turning him in. Many of the girls protest, as does McBurney
himself, having little interest in the war, as he is a deserter from the ranks,
preferring to make himself useful on the premises, but to Miss Martha that
option is unthinkable. We soon discover
why, as instead of leaving, he is discovered in the bedroom of the hormonally
challenged Alicia, found by Edwina, who he professed his love for, and is
shell-shocked by what she sees. With
both lovebirds professing their innocence, McBurney confronts a startled Edwina
at the top of the stairs, pushing him away, where he goes toppling down the
stairs, seriously re-injuring his leg.
In the pandemonium that follows, emotions erupt, as formality is thrown
out the window, actually turning momentarily into exaggerated camp while
McBurney loses his leg, though without the cringe-inducing graphic detail of
the original. When he realizes what’s
happened, he’s outraged, growing more and more belligerent, blaming Miss Martha
for jealously maiming him because he picked another girl, finding the gun, and
literally terrorizing the girls, all except Edwina who walks into his bedroom,
locks the door, and crawls into bed with him.
Nonetheless, he’s made it clear why no men are allowed on the premises,
as he offsets the balance of nature, like a fox in a chicken coop, ultimately
showing no respect whatsoever, grabbing all the alcohol he can drink until he
passes out, allowing the girls to quickly devise a plan to get rid of the wolf,
which works perfectly, exactly as it does in the original. Incredulously, these women lack for nothing,
as they are always dressed in their Sunday best, immaculately clean, and have
all the food and provisions they need, and then some, living luxuriously in a
time of deprivation and war, while others in the South are on the verge of
starvation. It’s a fantasy version of
the hard times that do exist, like taking a left turn into a parallel universe,
with Coppola remaining immune to the historical realities of the times. While
she does enter into the giddy mindsets of the girls, exposing their unique
group dynamic, characterized by privileged, overly sheltered lives and extreme
social isolation, her portraiture leaves out all the power and melodramatic
drama at the heart of the original.
No comments:
Post a Comment