Refined and darkly funny tale of a pigeon among cats
The Beguiled Cert tbc, 94 mins
Dir Sofia Coppola Starring Nicole Kidman, Colin Farrell, Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning, Oona Laurence, Angourie Rice, Emma Howard, Addison Riecke
John Mcburney (Colin Farrell) is a man who needs a woman’s touch. At the start of Sofia Coppola’s sensational new adaptation of Thomas P Cullinan’s novel The Beguiled, this Union soldier is stranded in rural Virginia, bleeding out beneath a canopy of cypress and Spanish moss. The booms of battle ring out nearby, and searching footsteps crunch through the trees, but it isn’t Confederate troops who find him. Rather, it’s Amy (Oona Laurence), a 12-year-old pupil of the Martha Farnworth Seminary for Young Ladies – one of the few girls still in residence at the school, as the Civil War creeps ever closer. Amy sees a soul in need, and helps Mcburney stagger to the seminary, where Miss Farnworth herself (Nicole Kidman) cleans and stitches his wounds. Recumbent on the divan, with pretty girls attending to his needs, he looks as if he’s in heaven. Little does he know he’s a pigeon among cats.
When it was announced last year that Coppola was remaking Cullinan’s novel for the screen, many of us who’d seen the 1971 Don Siegel version, with Clint Eastwood and Geraldine Page, were intrigued. How would this famously understated filmmaker – who won an Oscar for her skin-pricklingly fine-drawn screenplay for Lost in Translation (2003) – handle a story whose previous screen adaptation took in incest, misogyny, lesbian fantasies, explicit sex and bloodletting, and a scene in which the hero rasps at a 12-year-old that she’s “old enough for kisses” before planting a smacker on her astonished lips?
Well, here’s how: Coppola has pruned away almost everything outside her comfort zone, then distilled the plot down to a slender, refined and witheringly funny morality tale in which a tight-knit sisterhood is destabilised by one man, with increasingly horrific consequences… largely for him.
Its tone owes far less to Siegel’s lurid southern gothic romp than the languid, hazy rhythms of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). Very occasionally, Coppola’s determined paring back of her material brings about the storytelling equivalent of a record-skip. But, for the most part, this is not a film in a hurry: often in the seminary, there’s a sense that time is circling round on itself, as each day blurs into the next. Every scene is lit by shafts of sun or swaying flames, and composed by cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd like a John Singer Sargent painting come to life.
Eastwood’s Mcburney was coded as a predator from the start. Farrell’s is an opportunist. He enjoys being tempter and tempted, fatherly and mothered – and the school’s range of inhabitants, all of whom feel Christian sympathy for his predicament, afford him the pleasure of being all four at once.
Martha plies him with brandy and bed-baths, and has to mop her own brow afterwards. Amy looks up to him adoringly. Alicia (Elle Fanning) is some years older and more worldly-wise, with a lascivious glint. Then there’s Edwina Morrow (Kirsten Dunst), another teacher whose “delicate beauty”, says Mcburney, is the finest he’s seen on all his travels. She’s flattered and thereafter marked as an easy target.
In short, no wonder he likes it there. “Your whole flower garden needs tending,” he tells Martha with a twinkle one morning, and he’s not just talking abut the begonias.
Coppola and her cast express the softly shifting chemistry in the school with consummate control and wit. Scenes are spritzed with minuscule double entendres, telling micro-glances and sly social manoeuvring – there’s a wonderful sequence in which the girls each claim responsibility for some element of an apple pie Mcburney has enjoyed. It’s the kind of mood that brings out the best in Kidman, who is deliciously subtle but with a lemony edge of camp that allows her to twist a scene with the arch of an eyebrow or parting of her lips.
Perhaps best of all is Dunst, whose softly heartbreaking performance keeps the film emotionally grounded as it skulks, late on, back into the woods and towards Mcburney’s reckoning. Still, it’s every inch a group achievement, with the women arrayed like flavours on an ice cream counter, and Farrell the boy with his nose pressed greedily to the glass.
The Beguiled will be released in British cinemas on Friday July 14