As lushly beautiful a film as any that Coppola has made, which is saying something; despite the 1860s, Civil War-era Virginia setting, the one to which it most harks back is The Virgin Suicides. A mistiness hangs over everything, from the forest of the opening scene to the many still shots of the grand southern house and gardens in which all of the rest of the action takes place (lending extra weight to the intrusion of Colin Farrell's wounded soldier's presence and the interactions with other outsiders at the ornate gate, as well as the slow zoom-in past his body and the tied blue ribbon that closes the film), and the atmosphere is charged and intense with a heaviness that is almost gothic by around the mid section - an air that's added to by the (deliberate, I'm sure) unreadability of all of the adult principals (Farrell, Kidman, Dunst; Elle Fanning also sound).
It's not just a mood piece, but rather turns out to be interestingly difficult to parse in terms of what it has to say about its characters' motivations, choices and limitations, with the characters' actions and the turns of the plot emerging in a way that seems straightforward but is, at the same time, somewhat cryptic in that very simplicity, making it hard to know how we should feel about it all. Coppola is, along with Wong Kar Wai, comfortably the most iconic film director active today for me, and The Beguiled is an intriguing addition to her catalogue.
(w/ Kelly)
It's not just a mood piece, but rather turns out to be interestingly difficult to parse in terms of what it has to say about its characters' motivations, choices and limitations, with the characters' actions and the turns of the plot emerging in a way that seems straightforward but is, at the same time, somewhat cryptic in that very simplicity, making it hard to know how we should feel about it all. Coppola is, along with Wong Kar Wai, comfortably the most iconic film director active today for me, and The Beguiled is an intriguing addition to her catalogue.
(w/ Kelly)
