#518: Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled
Sofia Coppola’s naturalistic Southern Gothic is a dark tale about isolation and repression
Initial release: May 24, 2017
Director: Sofia Coppola
The American Civil War was a landmark in national history. It signaled an end to the status quo of half of America’s economy being wrapped up in chattel slavery; it was a conflagration nearly a century in the making when the Founding Fathers effectively kicked the can down the road in the name of national unity. In short, it was the end of an era, the end of a south dependent on owning human beings to get anything done. As Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled shows, when the lifestyle you’re accustomed to is taken away, it’s very easy to slip into denial and isolation.
Welcome to the Farnsworth Seminary school for girls. It’s Virginia, 1864, and the war has been raging for some time. Union troops have made tremendous gains, and it’s only a matter of time before their victory is complete. The slaves have long since fled, as have the majority of the teachers and students, leaving only five students, one teacher and the headmistress herself — for they have nowhere else to go. They spend their days in relatively peaceful isolation, their lessons interrupted only by the distant sounds of battle. When the youngest girl goes hunting for mushrooms and finds a wounded Union soldier instead, it’s cause for consternation, but headmistress Martha makes the executive decision to care for the soldier and figure out what to do with him later. The soldier, for his part, does his best to ingratiate himself with his carers/captors, flattering each one in turn, but saving the majority of his flattery for Edwina, the teacher; as time passes, it becomes clear that each of the girls is jealous of the time the others get to spend with him. Martha is eager to get rid of him once he’s back on his feet, because he’s a major disruption to the idyllic world she’s constructed for herself and her charges. It’s not just that he’s a man in a woman’s world, and that his presence is perceptibly changing the atmosphere of the school, changing its inhabitants: he is a part of the outside world, and that’s unconscionable for Martha — for the Farnsworth Seminary, time is supposed to be stopped.
The Beguiled makes the second Sofia Coppola film I’ve seen now, after the punk-rock princess biopic Marie Antoinette, and it’s clear that her filmmaking talent has grown exponentially. As I watched this film I was struck by how much it reminded me of other films I enjoyed; the isolated setting of a girl’s school was reminiscent of Picnic at Hanging Rock, and the gorgeous natural lighting and cinematography was very much in line with Barry Lyndon (and likely much more easily done with modern technology than the lengths Stanley Kubrick had to go to get the image he wanted!) As headmistress of the house, Nicole Kidman brings a lot of her performance in The Others to her role as Martha, especially in night scenes where the only light is candles.
Kirsten Dunst, in yet another collaboration with Coppola, is great as Edwina; her fascination with Colin Farrell’s Corporal McBurney is the core of the film’s dark final scenes, as McBurney — who earlier had rightly pointed out that she sticks out at the school — effectively spurns her, leading her to push him down a flight of steps, breaking his already-wounded leg and sending him into a violent spiral of rage and despair — a series of moments that actually work in Farrell’s favor, putting his tendency to overact to use. The film largely bounces between Edwina and Martha and their interactions with McBurney, but they all get a turn being beguiled by this enemy visitor. All this is happening amidst a hauntingly beautiful backdrop; very little music plays in the film, most of what exists is diagetic. Rather, we’re treated to the sounds of nature, birds and crickets; Coppola’s sense of pacing and framing has created a dreamlike atmosphere that emphasizes the fantasy the women and girls of the Farnsworth Seminary live in.
It’s worth talking a bit about the historical context. When the film was initially released, some criticism was leveled at it for having completely removed Mattie, a slave character from the 1966 book upon which the film is based. But Coppola has argued that her film removed Mattie for two reasons: one, as the Union advanced into Confederate territory, slaves often fled their masters; in the film, it’s shown that Union troops are quite nearby (after all, where else could McBurney have come from?) and so it would have been historically inaccurate to have slaves in the house — and it’s explicitly stated in the film that they’ve all left. The other reason is that with the slaves gone, white women across the South had found themselves completely at a loss as to how to run a house, and their continued denial about what was happening around them is the central focus of the film; to include a character who, as written in Thomas Cullinan’s original book, is an offensive stereotype, to serve only as a side character to the film’s broader theme, would be doing the topic of slavery an injustice. The Beguiled isn’t so much a film about slavery, as it’s a film about what happens when the women of a society that depends on slavery suddenly must learn to do without. Rather than embrace the change, the women of the film simply close their doors and enact a fantasy. That comparison to The Others was purposeful: Martha and her charges are (metaphorical) ghosts, clinging to a life that is now over.
Sofia Coppola, much like her father, is not a filmmaker for everybody. Her overriding focus has long been on atmosphere and beauty, but therein lies her strength. The Beguiled is a movie about perfect fantasies, and what happens when those fantasies are shattered. All the more reason to shatter them.
