Score: 4.5 / 5
It's always refreshing to get one of those movies that sticks to its guns. Leave it to an auteur like Sofia Coppola to do it again with The Beguiled, where her artistic integrity -- for better or worse -- remains intact for the whole feature. It's obvious she isn't concerned about much beyond her vision for this piece, which makes it a fascinating moment as well as a beautiful one. What it doesn't make it is easy to watch or understand.
The story, if you haven't read it or seen the 1971 film, has a simple plot. A group of women, alone in a plantation-style house in Virginia, find a wounded Union soldier and take him in. As they nurse him to health, they grow fond of him and he flirts with each in turn. Jealousy and sexual tension undermine their lives while rivalries spring up to test the bonds of their community.
Especially as it is gorgeously filmed by Coppola, this picture is incredibly dense. Claustrophobic and atmospheric, it's an absorbing exercise in technical craft. White-washed linens contrast magnificently with darkened, candlelit interiors as well as the Spanish moss hanging from the gnarled willows outside. Amidst this beauty, we get glimpses of incredible internal struggle. The girls want to be women but enjoy their playful youth. The women don't know how to handle their sexuality. They can't quite balance Southern hospitality with safety or prudence. Their political, moral, and religious alliances are put to the test. Their Edenic isolation is at times choking; they each struggle with alienation from each other but cannot leave the property.
Add to this mess a hunky wounded man who requires care -- including a delicious scrub-bath -- and you know it won't end well. His are the eyes of a calculating man. We get the sense that he is a fine man, good-mannered and kind to children and animals, a gardener and tender of the earth, gentle and humble and thankful. We also get the sense that he's a liar and deeply unbalanced. He's terrified of being caught and imprisoned, and he's terrified of going back to war. PTSD or no, he toys with the affections of his hostesses, flirting and seducing them, even turning violent when he gets caught.
It's all a sort of psychosexual chamber play, a vivid heterosexual nightmare of what can go wrong between the sexes. There's hardly a moment we don't see coming, but that doesn't stop us from staring at the horror. Dangerous as the man is, he's nothing compared to the women, who all keep their motives hidden and play their cards close to the chest. It's a masterful game of facades and deception and power-play that could take whole psychoanalytic seminars to unpack. And all that's to say nothing of the perhaps problematic absence of anyone of color: One of the women in the school is, in the book and earlier film, a black slave. Rather than simply criticizing the lack of this character, we would do well to consider the impact this has on the film, the story, and our cultural moment. There is no easy answer, of course.
All that said, I can't help but feel just the tiniest bit wanting in the final film. I just wanted more. More violence, more sex, more Gothic imagery. Something to set it apart from the book and 1971 film, something special and different. I found myself getting distracted as I thought of all the exciting, crazy things I would have done in this adaptation had I written or directed it. Which really isn't the best response a movie like this should get.
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