Sofia turns to women for ‘The Beguiled’

“Sorry, we just really girledout on you,” Kirsten Dunst says with Sofia Coppola and Elle Fanning by her side. Dunst is apologising for a tangent in conversation about the annoyances of periodaccurate, braided hair. But she could just as well be talking, with comic understatement, about their film, the Southern Gothic thriller

Coppola’s latest premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, rocking the festival with its female spin on a famed 1970s film with the opposite perspective. The Beguiled is Coppola’s remake of Don Siegel’s 1971 Civil War film starring Clint Eastwood as an injured Union soldier who takes shelter in an allgirls boarding school in the South.

Coppola hadn’t seen it until her friend and production designer Anne Ross called her up. “She was like, ‘You should see this movie. You need to remake it,’” recalled Coppola, the director of Lost in Translation and Virgin Suicides. “I was like, ‘I would never remake a movie.’”

But the film stayed in Coppola’s mind, and she began thumbing through the A Painted Devil, the 1966 Thomas Cullinan novel the film was based on. She wanted to flip the point of view. “That was part of the fun, thinking: ‘God, how would I do this movie,’” said Coppola. “The first thing I thought was Kirsten could be the teacher, Elle could be the naughty student. They’re like my favourite actresses and I wanted to see them together.” The film’s lead roles are played by Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell, but Fanning and, in particular, Dunst, make for some of the film’s most resonant moments. —AP