“Sofia Coppola delivers a very enjoyable southern melodrama, the tale of a handsome, badly wounded Union soldier in enemy terrain during the American civil war who throws himself on the mercy of a ladies’ seminary—of all the outrageous things.” The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw: “Their inhabitants are all of a decorous flutter at the idea of this semi-unclothed male to whom they must minister, intimately.”
“Ruthlessly shorn from Thomas P. Cullinan’s 1966 novel of the same name (and not remade from the Don Siegel adaptation that first brought its story to the screen), The Beguiled is a lurid, sweltering, and sensationally fun potboiler that doesn’t find Coppola leaving her comfort zone so much as redecorating it with a fresh layer of soft-core scuzz,” writes IndieWire’s David Ehrlich. “The year is 1864, the Civil War still rages on despite the outcome growing more certain by the day, and—somewhere amidst the unloved willow trees that surround the Great Dismal Swamp of southeastern Virginia—seven women of various ages are cooped up in a schoolhouse like chickens waiting to be plucked.”
“Coppola’s version abounds in pleasures,” grants Jessica Kiang at the Playlist, “from the starry cast (at least four of whom almost coincidentally seem to be hitting their career-best strides at exactly the same moment) to Philippe Le Sourd‘s cinematography, all misty woods, dangling creepers and softly sparkling candlelit interiors.” But “it feels strangely unkinked and scrubbed clean: stiff-backed and proper, with its hair tucked into neat braids and its crinolines smoothed down. Coppola can be breathtakingly modernist, and often complicates and challenges her own unparalleled instincts for filmmaking of ballerina elegance and classicism. But The Beguiled only ever lets its freak flag fly at half mast, and, certainly until the end where some very enjoyable archness is allowed to creep in, this Southern Gothic tale of female sexual jealousy feels surprisingly old school.”
“Its tone owes far less to Siegel’s lurid southern gothic romp than the languid, hazy rhythms of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), which were also heavily detectable in Coppola’s own 1999 feature debut, The Virgin Suicides,” suggests the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin.
“The world in question is Miss Martha Farnsworth’s School for Girls,” writes Sophie Monks Kaufman for Little White Lies. “Behind locked gates, in a beautiful, white-pillared building, five schoolgirls—including seductress-in-the-making Alicia (Elle Fanning)—are taught French, sewing, music and other ladylike pursuits by exacting headmistress, Martha (Nicole Kidman) and her assistant, Edwina (Kirsten Dunst). . . . Into this microcosm of feminine civilizations comes enemy soldier, Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell). Brought in after the youngest girl, Emily (Emma Howard), finds him wounded in the woods, the Corporal initially thinks he’s been delivered to the promised land. . . . Coppola’s achievement here is the creation of a tone that is perfectly poised between straight-laced good behavior and the sexual impulses throbbing beneath. That, more or less, is the film.”
“Farrell exudes such soulful sincerity that every kindness McBurney utters to the women feels genuine,” writes Screen’s Tim Grierson. “Just as formidable is Kidman, who plays Martha as a woman who perhaps grasps that her world of genteel privilege is fading away, a realization that infuses everything she does with bittersweet resignation.”
“Apologies to Colin Farrell, but this is Kidman's movie,” adds John Bleasdale at CineVue.
“The director of Lost in Translation and The Bling Ring dials down the potential for steaminess, violence and easy shocks and opts for a more controlled, gently simmering tension,” writes Time Out’s Dave Calhoun. “There’s none of the pop-song period flavor of Marie Antoinette (there’s barely any music early in the film; later, a restrained score by Phoenix kicks in) . . . The Beguiled has its jolts and its laughs, but mostly this glides along like a mildly cheeky, poetically made parable, well dressed, well designed and well performed.”
“I count myself as a Coppola believer (I even liked her Hollywood art ramble Somewhere),” writes Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, “but this may be the first film she has made in which her essential personality as a director gets buried under the movie she’s making. She has ‘feminized’ The Beguiled to the point that she has really just pummeled it into the shape of a prestige movie, one that ends with a telling tableau of the film’s female characters posed in formation, like some Civil War sorority of the newly woke. Coppola, in attempting to elevate the material, doesn’t seem to realize that The Beguiled is, and always was, a pulp psychodrama. Now it’s pulp with the juice squeezed out of it.”
Variety’s Ramin Setoodeh talks with Coppola and Dunst, who “have fostered an unbreakable bond over the past two decades and four movies.”
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