The Beguiled review: Southern seduction

A superb cast and Sofia Coppola’s deft direction make this US Civil War drama about an injured soldier aided by prim schoolmistresses a simmering study in repressed sexuality
Matthew Norman16 November 2017

Tomorrow is another day, as someone said to conclude a vintage US Civil War movie. But ah do declare that few days have been as different from yesterday as the one that begins The Beguiled.

The previous evening in 1864, the third and penultimate year of that spirited disagreement over slavery between the Union and Confederacy, all was suitably serene at Miss Martha Farmsworth’s Seminary for Young Ladies.

Cosseted from the horror raging beyond their Doric-columned, pseudo-Grecian mansion on a defunct plantation in Virginia, the only five girls left under the charge of Martha (Nicole Kidman) and her lone adult colleague Edwina Morrow (Kirsten Dunst) were sewing, conjugating French verbs and practising daintily at the piano.

'It might be costume drama, historical romcom, proto-feminist morality tale or full-on gothic... It might even, if y’all would excuse me, make a spirited porno'

When the next day dawns, and 11-year-old Miss Emily (Emma Howard) saunters into the mist-shrouded woods to collect mushrooms, what she finds in the undergrowth is badly wounded Yankee soldier Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell). Once Emily has helped this Irish mercenary hobble back to the seminary, the question at the heart of the drama is the one familiar to anyone who responsibly picks mushrooms. Is he as harmless and delicious as he looks, or deceptively poisonous?

The premise of a scary enemy combatant (all Yankee soldiers are rapists, says one of the younger girls when Martha democratically calls a debate on whether he can stay) thrust into a genteel feminine world could take various shapes. It might be costume drama, historical romcom, proto-feminist morality tale or full-on gothic horror (as in Don Siegel’s 1971 original, based on a Thomas Cullinan novel and starring Clint Eastwood). It might even, if y’all would excuse me, make a spirited porno.

Sofia Coppola, that laureate of cinematic delicacy, moulds it into a strange and peculiarly captivating hybrid. Part comedy of manners, part understated paean to the re-arousal of repressed female sexuality, part slow-burn psychological thriller, The Beguiled is a trailblazing explorer of that previously uncharted nexus where Jane Austen meets Stephen King.

It is also, as illustrated by the soundtrack, a film of contrasts. Beyond the occasional piano recital, barely any music is heard. All the action, and the languid inaction, plays out to a symphony of birdsong from the garden and the more distant cannon fire as the rival armies do their worst to one another.

No wonder McBurney is delighted when Miss Martha, Miss Edwina and the five young misses vote to give him respite, graciously allowing him stay until his leg has healed. And equally small surprise that all seven females, including the pre-pubescents, are thrilled to have the tedium of interbellum life pierced by a soulful, handsome charmer with a twinkle in his eye and a seductive Dublin brogue on his lips.

​Coppola prefers to simmer sex than let it boil over and releases the eroticism in wispy plumes of steam. Early on, when Miss Martha bathes the filthy, louse-ridden McBurney, she avoids any festering bits that would have had Kidman’s nose twitching with more disgust than Samantha’s in Bewitched. Fiddle-dee-dee, shame on her, as a loyal Southern belle, but she keeps her sponge on the northern side of his waistly borderline while dabbing tremulously at the filth.

Meanwhile, the eye-fluttering of mildly minxy late teen Miss Alicia (Elle Fanning), who has other conjugations in mind than those involving French verbs, is as crude a glimpse of sexual epiphany as Coppola permits.

The struggle for John’s attention between Alicia and the two adult women slowly intensifies as he regains his strength and moulds his appeal to the taste of each member of the household in the cause of extending his cushy berth.

For almost the entirety of this nominally Civil War film there are lashings of cultivated civility and little hint of the war. Coppola’s removal of the slave character who features in the book and earlier film at first seems, given the casus belli, an ironic and unnerving oddity. On reflection, relegating the Civil War to little more than a plot device enables her to create an almost timeless, borderline magical-realist parallel world.

The Beguiled, in pictures

1/9

Needless to state, the ceasefire between the appetites of the fragrant gentlewomen and the desire of the sweaty man in their midst cannot hold. When the fragile truce breaks down, the transformation from sepia Jane

Austen-y tableaux (freeze any frame from a candlelit dinner scene where the females are in their taffeta gowns and McBurney in his freshly laundered uniform, and it could be a still from Pride and Prejudice) to the grandiose horror of Misery is lightning-quick.

If that makes the pacing a touch uneven, and if there’s a faint aftertaste of an exceedingly dark tale sanitised for stylistic elegance, these are minor whinges. The film is a total joy to watch from first frame to the last, not least because the ensemble cast is impeccable.

Dunst lends the ideal measure of coiled physical longing to her prim spinster, Fanning is impressively sparing with her jailbait allure, Farrell subtly nails the soldier’s ambiguity, and Kidman injects precisely enough wit and mischief into her apparently god-fearing schoolmarm to justify the twists (the final one worthy of Roald Dahl) that might otherwise have seemed daftly melodramatic.

The luminous star here, however, is Coppola. In less adroit hands, the paucity of plotting and economy of characterisation would have buried one’s interest beneath a mound of prettified so-what-ishness. But she has sewn a silk taffeta ballgown of a movie that enticingly hints at what lies beneath the flimsy surface without needing to flaunt the flesh. Frankly, my dears, you will give a damn.

Cert 15, 94 mins

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