Companion viewing
"The Beguiled" (1971)
"The Virgin Suicides" (1999)
"Lost in Translation" (2003)
In 1971 “The Beguiled,” starring Clint Eastwood, was the first R-rated film I saw, and it caused a stir in my sixth-grade elementary school class. Now Sofia Coppola remakes “The Beguiled” and turns it into something uniquely her own.
“The Beguiled” was directed by Don Siegel and placed Eastwood’s wounded Union soldier at the center of this Gothic thriller. Adapted from the Thomas Cullinan novel, “The Beguiled” was a Civil War era tale about Corporal John McBurney who flees battle after suffering an injury and is taken in at a Southern all-girls school that is isolated from the war.
The 1971 version, with a male lead and directed by a man and based on a book by a man, focused on the soldier. Coppola, however, decides to spin the tale from the women’s point of view in order to deliver a remake that has a reason for revisiting the original material.
Coppola took home the best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, and she reveals her continued interest in telling stories from a female perspective without making that an issue. As with her first film, “The Virgin Suicides,” “The Beguiled” reveals her exquisite eye for detail. In this case, she focuses on things like yellowing lace curtains, special pearl jewelry and extravagant dresses brought out once a man enters the school.
The images are muted and faded as if through a haze. Coppola conveys the school’s isolation from the outside world and its insular nature. We hear the war sporadically raging off in the distance but the school seems disconnected from it as the girls practice their French and take their regular music lessons.
But there is a kind of heavy, suffocating atmosphere that lingers over the school and the abrupt presence of McBurney (now played by Colin Farell) makes it feel even more oppressive.
As with her other films, Coppola has a wonderful ensemble of actresses. She and Kirsten Dunst have worked together before (“The Virgin Suicides,” “Marie Antoinette”) and she now adds Nicole Kidman, Elle Fanning and Oona Laurence.
The actresses display a nice set of contrasts between maturity and innocence, repression and rebellion. Kidman, as the school headmistress Miss Martha, displays a fierce assurance and remains unrattled by things like broken bones and stitching up open wounds, but she is on a less stable ground when it comes to the messy emotions that this male presence stirs among her girls.
Coppola does a good job of endowing this remake with her own personal style. She creates a sense of quiet tension and finds the polite horrors that these Southern ladies are capable of.
But her film never gets to the feeling of horror that the original had and that is in part because of her change of focus.
In the 1971 film, we were seeing events mostly through Eastwood’s eyes and experienced his growing sense of fear at what these women were doing to him. But by focusing on the women, we no longer feel that same sense of growing apprehension because we feel that we know more about the women and what motivates their behavior. So the shock moments that made the original film more visceral seem more muted here.
“The Beguiled” (rated R for some sexuality) is a clever remake that proves if you have a vision for reimagining a film you can deliver something effective. Coppola’s “The Beguiled” is not a great film in the way “The Virgin Suicides” was, but it is a gorgeous and mesmerizing one that adds to her body of work with some new shadings and textures.
