The Beguiled

Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled is a remake of a 1971 Clint Eastwood film, which in turn is an adaptation of A Painted Devil, a novel by Thomas P. Cullinan. It is set in 1863 during the middle of the American Civil War at an all-girls boarding school in Mississippi, a building of true Southern Gothic architecture surrounded by sprawling woods and patrolling Confederate troops. The slaves are long gone (“fled”) and the girls study French and adhere to the strict etiquette imposed by the domineering Miss Martha (Nicole Kidman). When out picking mushrooms 11-year old Amy stumbles on an injured – and handsome – Union soldier Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell) and persuades him to hobble home with her. The cat is among the pigeons, so to speak.

Instantly the setting and period bring to mind such films as Picnic at Hanging Rock, Carol Morley’s The Falling and any of the old St Trinians films. With the candle-lit, high-ceilinged rooms, the white Ionic columns barricading the girls from the outside world, the school is like a mausoleum, in which the beguiling itself is the enchantment. The film isn’t a fairy tale, but it comes close: the injured prince in the locked room, the young girls in white dresses, the twisting branches of the trees beyond the gates.

The four leads, Kirsten Dunst, Colin Farrell, Elle Fanning and Nicole Kidman, give some of the most nuanced and delicate performances of any of Coppola’s previous films. The age spectrum is wide, the dynamic complex; when Farrell’s character is brought into the house the foundations of this tight group begin to slip. McBurney – a Yankee, and therefore the “enemy” in this situation – brings the women around with his manners and rugged charm, and from the start appears to be on a mission to manipulate, but it isn’t long before the tables are turned and the film’s title hangs ambiguously above the players.