Southern discomfort
YOUNG BELLES’ WORLD UPENDED BY UNION SOLDIER IN COPPOLA’S ‘BEGUILED’
I’m half off the Sofia Coppola train. She may have won both the venerable Palm d’Or and the best director prizes at Cannes with her sex-besotted Southern Gothic tale “The Beguiled.” But I was not quite as beguiled as the Cannes judges by the film, although I adored the cinematography and the performances are undeniably very good.
To begin with, Don Siegel’s trashyartsy 1971 version “The Beguiled” — with Clint Eastwood as the wounded Union soldier who takes advantage of (or is he taken advantage by?) a group of sex-hungry Southern belles hiding in a Spanish moss-hung mansion/school and who take him in — is probably my least favorite of the Siegel-Eastwood collaborations, although it is better than the remake.
Both “Beguiled” films are based on a 1966 novel by Thomas Cullinan, also the author of “The Besieged” and “The Bedeviled,” if you can believe it. In Coppola’s film, young Cpl. John McBurney is played by Irishman Colin Farrell, whose ability to cast an erotic spell has diminished in my view, especially since “The Lobster.”
McBurney is taken in reluctantly by headmistress Miss Martha (a sexually simmering Nicole Kidman), head of a household of French verb-conjugating young women in the waning days of the Civil War. Among her coinhabitants in the beautifully photographed by Philippe Le Sourd (“The Grandmaster”) house and grounds are the frankly sexstarved teacher Edwina (Kirsten Dunst), underage wild thing Alicia (Elle Fanning) and precocious child Amy (a very good Oona Laurence).
McBurney is the not-so-subtle serpent in the all-female paradise created by Miss Martha (and Coppola). Conspicuously lacking in this version is the sexual abuse-familiar African slave played by Mae Mercer in the Siegel film. Those of us who remember Mercer miss her character. Objections have been raised about Coppola’s “whitewashing” of the film. Admirers of Coppola’s film have cited her interest in the group psychology of women in such previous films as “The Virgin Suicides,” which I think is overrated, and “The Bling Ring,” which I can barely remember.
Kidman’s Miss Martha, who is oddly less kinky than the one played by the great Geraldine Fitzgerald in the original, is fiercely attracted to McBurney, and Kidman is very good at expressing this burning, middle-aged lust. But Edwina finds him in the clinch with Alicia, and he gets knocked down a flight of stairs, badly breaking his leg. What happens next is a symbolic castration. Coppola does little to mitigate the innate misogyny of the piece. Mushrooms anyone? Any connection between “The Beguiled” and Stephen King’s “Misery” is purely respectful, I guess. At least King didn’t call his book “The Bedraggled.”
(“The Beguiled” is rated R but weirdly unsexy, given the subject matter and themes.)