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During the Civil War, the occupants of an all-girls boarding school in Virginia discover a wounded Union soldier and decide to harbour him rather than turn him over to the Confederates.
When I find myself paying attention to the editing of a film during an initial viewing, it's usually for one of three reasons. One, it's noticeably good. Two, it's noticeably bad. Three, the rest of the film isn't really keeping my attention. I can't tell if watching Coppola's The Beguiled so soon after the similarly slow-burning It Comes at Night worked for it or against it. The same sense of dread starts to creep in as you know that this tale of a Union soldier being taken in by a handful of Southerners is probably not going to end well, but the film doesn't go in for horror conventions. The emphasis on low-key dramatics suits this ensemble piece as all performers are placed on equal footing - established award-winners like Nicole Kidman and Kirsten Dunst find suitable foils in the up-and-coming actresses playing their students. A combination of stationary camerawork and a near-total lack of non-diegetic music emphasise the stage-like nature of this bottled-up narrative to solid effect - perhaps that's why the editing stands out more. When a cut between shots of different distances occurs in the middle of a sentence, it is very much a cut from a double-edged sword.
Beyond the subtle yet appreciable ways that it works on a technical level and the solid ensemble that pulls together, The Beguiled is still a comparatively straightforward film. Its brief running time is a point in its favour as it heads towards an inexorable (but not necessarily predictable) conclusion and develops its characters just enough to guarantee that they will slowly but surely gravitate towards or be repelled by one another as the plot demands. It's a little light on the thematics, but it's not saying anything particularly objectionable in terms of how it negotiates both social and personal politics (though I couldn't speak to Coppola's deliberate removal of a slave character from the source narrative). I already described this as "the most OK movie of 2017" and there's not a whole lot going on that can change that for better or worse.
THE BEGUILED
Sofia Coppola, 2017
Sofia Coppola, 2017
During the Civil War, the occupants of an all-girls boarding school in Virginia discover a wounded Union soldier and decide to harbour him rather than turn him over to the Confederates.
When I find myself paying attention to the editing of a film during an initial viewing, it's usually for one of three reasons. One, it's noticeably good. Two, it's noticeably bad. Three, the rest of the film isn't really keeping my attention. I can't tell if watching Coppola's The Beguiled so soon after the similarly slow-burning It Comes at Night worked for it or against it. The same sense of dread starts to creep in as you know that this tale of a Union soldier being taken in by a handful of Southerners is probably not going to end well, but the film doesn't go in for horror conventions. The emphasis on low-key dramatics suits this ensemble piece as all performers are placed on equal footing - established award-winners like Nicole Kidman and Kirsten Dunst find suitable foils in the up-and-coming actresses playing their students. A combination of stationary camerawork and a near-total lack of non-diegetic music emphasise the stage-like nature of this bottled-up narrative to solid effect - perhaps that's why the editing stands out more. When a cut between shots of different distances occurs in the middle of a sentence, it is very much a cut from a double-edged sword.
Beyond the subtle yet appreciable ways that it works on a technical level and the solid ensemble that pulls together, The Beguiled is still a comparatively straightforward film. Its brief running time is a point in its favour as it heads towards an inexorable (but not necessarily predictable) conclusion and develops its characters just enough to guarantee that they will slowly but surely gravitate towards or be repelled by one another as the plot demands. It's a little light on the thematics, but it's not saying anything particularly objectionable in terms of how it negotiates both social and personal politics (though I couldn't speak to Coppola's deliberate removal of a slave character from the source narrative). I already described this as "the most OK movie of 2017" and there's not a whole lot going on that can change that for better or worse.