Movie Review: It's Ladies Night in Sofia Coppola's Unsettling and Strangely Funny "The Beguiled"

Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled is a buttoned-up sex comedy disguised as a ponderous period piece.

That doesn’t mean it’s disposable or lascivious (or, on the other hand, sluggish). It simply plunges a wounded soldier into an all-female boarding house, where he recuperates and gets sponge-baths while the ladies compete for his attention with longing looks, bare shoulders and (gasp!) new brooches.

Don’t be fooled by the corsets and candlelit cinematography. They may as well have called it Carry on Convalescing.

Colin Farrell, wickedly perfect, plays Corporal John McBurney, a Yankee soldier with a nasty leg wound hiding from Confederate soldiers in Virginia, circa 1864, three years into America’s Civil War. He’s spotted by Amy (Oona Laurence), a young girl collecting mushrooms on the outer limits of her school’s estate, which is bordered by the creeping warfare. (The thunderous boom of cannon-fire is close.)

Sympathetic to his injury, Amy helps him to the impeccably set-decorated mansion she shares with four remaining students—Elle Fanning’s Alicia, Angourie Rice’s Jane, Emma Howard’s Emily and Addison Riecke’s Marie—along with headmistress Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman) and virginal teacher Edwina Morrow (Kristen Dunst).

The women are all Confederate supporters, but they agree to do the Christian thing and help Corporal McBurney recover before handing him over as a POW. He immediately whips out his best weapon—an easy, Irish charm—in a desperate move to get any of the ladies to fall for him and grant him permanent residence. His firehose approach to pheromone-spraying, however, catches a snag. It’s too effective.

In the 1971 original, Farrell’s role was played by Clint Eastwood, and you can see an enlarged Clint on its poster, above the women’s fierce heads. Farrell gets no such honour in 2017, his face out of frame as the true leads—Kidman, Dunst and Fanning—loom over him. Coppola may not know what the ‘Bechdel Test’ is, yet the filmmaker knows how to reset a feminist narrative accordingly. (She unfortunately takes race out of the prickly era’s equation by keeping the cast white, despite the setting and source material.)

The man-starved women of the Virginian boarding house (which, by the way, kinda-already sounds like a Corman flick) are easily swayed by McBurney because he offers each what they’re lacking: romance, praise, an escape, a friend. For Martha, Edwina and Alicia, in particular, he presents a body. Those carnal desires aren’t to be considered flippantly. McBurney, in many respects, is their enemy: He’s a Union soldier, he’s a war deserter, he’s a cad and he’s a man. The ladies, victims of circumstance, grow more open-minded with the glimpse at the outside world he offers, and they’re teased into abandoning their morals by the impulses of their libido. They also learn some men use sex as a weapon against women. By the end, they take that lesson to heart.

Writer-director Coppola, adapting Thomas P. Cullinan’s novel A Painted Devil, untangles this lusty morass and repackages it as her first true successor to The Virgin Suicides, which covered similar ground. (Her later efforts, from Lost in Translation to The Bling Ring, focused instead on the emptiness of fame, with decreasing success—except Somewhere, which was stolen by a young Elle Fanning and deserves a second look.) Coppola's camera remains static, yet that only adds to all the simmering repression; cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd assists by using the lens to recreate some lush, 19th century brushwork.

Most unexpectedly, Coppola's latest delivers genuine laughs, even as the characters grow more desolate and distressed. The Beguiled is certainly meant to be taken seriously, and it’s a fascinating flip of sexual politics and gender dynamics (of the time, and of today). Dunst and Fanning carry the movie’s suppressed urges, expertly. But the picture indeed takes a turn for the riotous around the halfway mark. Though you wouldn’t necessarily call it ‘camp’, Nicole Kidman’s ominous delivery of the line “bring me the anatomy book,” and her impossibly-perfect, shade-throwing, tea-sipping ‘eye-dart’ during a late dinner sequence were made to be GIF’d.

Her instantly iconic moments are what I will think of the next time I see the phrase “I am screaming” scrawled on Tumblr, under something less deserving, I’m sure.

4/5

In cinemas July 13. Rated M for mature themes and sex.

Photo: Universal