If Ken Loach is the poet of the disenfranchised, then Sofia Coppola is the prophet of the privileged. Ever since Lost In Translation, her surprise 2003 hit, Coppola’s glacial films have infallibly tried to account and apologise for the bourgeoisie, painting society’s most wealthy citizens as isolated and unhappy – to which the less sympathetic might respond, “Boo fucking hoo.”
So perhaps it’s unsurprising that despite its wartime setting, Coppola’s new film The Beguiled is overstuffed with anachronistically lavish banquets, spotless, beautiful dresses and unrelenting shots of dappled light swimming through the trees of the deep south. This is no gothic horror, nor the thriller that its marketing material hinted that it might be – instead, The Beguiled is just another tedious exercise in excess, albeit one a little less blatantly offensive than Coppola’s prior slicks of cultural diarrhea.
A remake of the 1971 Clint Eastwood vehicle of the same name, The Beguiled opens in the third year of the Civil War, as a wounded union soldier named Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell) seeks shelter in a boarding school for young women. Although the school’s students and skeleton staff – most notably headmistress Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman) and young pupil Alicia (Elle Fanning) – initially consider surrendering McBurney to roaming Confederate forces, they eventually decide to provide him with sanctuary, driven by both Christian ideals of charity and some significantly more fleshy considerations.
From there, The Beguiled follows the beats of the original, albeit in a tediously muted way. The 1971 film was downright leery, full of bed-hopping and bawdiness, but Coppola tries to rein her subject matter in, focusing instead (surprise surprise) on lavish displays of culture and wealth. As a result, an odd discrepancy between filmmaker and film emerges: every time Coppola goes high, you can hear her script straining towards the depraved, and for a work largely concerned with lust and longing, The Beguiled sure feels neutered.
By the time it’s all done, there’s not much separating The Beguiled from a glorified perfume commercial, or a Civil War-set advert for sleeping pills. Whereas the original was a flawed yet admirably deviant investigation into the interplay between sex and control, Coppola’s remake is one more somnambulistic slice of decadence, a film with all the impact of a fart in a bathtub.
The Beguiled was reviewed as part of Sydney Film Festival 2017. It opens in cinemas on Thursday July 13.
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