1. A few minutes into “The Beguiled” I found myself thinking about Tesla, of all things. Not the car, since this is a period piece, set in rural Virginia during the.
2. Coppola comes from the opposite direction, in which the primal threat is to women. She gives The Beguiled a soft but radiant palette, her frames suggesting a fragile.

Far from it. It’s a crudely lit piece of baroque Gothic exploitation, “gripping” yet overwrought, and it basically has the plot of a porn film. Eastwood’s character falls into one bed after another, and he receives a shockingly cruel punishment when Geraldine Page, as the turned- on but repressed headmistress, makes the vengeful decision to amputate his injured leg for dubious medical reasons. Yet there’s no denying it’s a picture of its time. So why would Sofia Coppola want to remake it?

If you’re the sort of moviegoer who favors good taste over sensation, restraint over decadence, and decorous drama over porno leering, then you may actually like Coppola’s coolly pensive and sober new version of “The Beguiled.” But anyone else may wonder what, exactly, the movie thinks it’s doing. Watch Free Movies Online Soy Nero (2017) more. Coppola’s “Beguiled” is a handsomely shot and mounted production, full of stately images of moss- draped trees, and it flows along reasonably enough, streamlining the material down to a crisp 9. But if Coppola, who also wrote the script, sticks close to the basic story of the 1.

The Beguiled has promise with a strong story to tell. Unfortunately, it's too wrapped up in Sofia Coppola's naïveté and hubris to be anything more. It's sad really.

Thomas P. Cullinan’s 1. A Painted Devil”), she changes the tone, so that the characters, for a good while, seem more reasonable, less luridly dominated by their animal instincts. She has made the material “subtler,” but in the process she has amputated its essential charge. Corporal John Mc.

The kind of movie that lingers on in your head, just like the best fairy tales do. Sofia Coppola’s

Directed by Sofia Coppola. With Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning, Colin Farrell. The unexpected arrival of a wounded Union soldier at a girls' school in. The Beguiled is artful in depicting the myth of the sanctity of white womanhood as both protection and restriction. But why does it need to excise slavery in order to. Cannes 2017: Sofia Coppola’s Southern thriller The Beguiled is a rare remake that gets it right. May 24, 2017 You can’t stop.

Burney, now played by Colin Farrell, is a Union deserter who is nursing a wounded leg, but the film doesn’t portray him as the scurrilous manipulator that Eastwood’s Mc. Burney was. Farrell speaks in his Irish accent, giving the character the flashing- eyed courtly appeal of a gentleman prole, and the film raises the issue of whether he’s a coward only to dismiss it. Mc. Burney only recently came over from Dublin, so he has no investment in the Civil War. He’s a mercenary who hired himself out as a soldier for $3. At Miss Farnsworth’s Seminary for Young Ladies, housed in a white- columned mansion that looks even more than before like a knockoff of Tara (the setting is now Virginia), Mc. Burney, after getting his slashed leg sewn up, treats the school’s teachers and five students with chivalrous charm, and the movie doesn’t appear to hold the fact that he’s a bit of a flirt against him.

He’s not playing them — he’s just being who he is. The 1. 97. 1 version opened with Eastwood’s character planting a kiss on the lips of the 1. Coppola drops the pervy overtones, and she cuts down on the cornball repressed hysteria. Miss Martha Farnsworth, played by Nicole Kidman, is an upright Christian who likes to lead group Bible readings by candlelight, but Kidman, in a wide- awake performance, creates one of the rare portrayals of a puritanical believer who isn’t caricatured as a contemptible prig. For once, an actress makes walking the straight and narrow look like a reasonable choice. Early on, when Mc.

Burney is asleep and Martha sponges down his body, trembling a bit when she touches his hip, it’s not one of those nudge- nudge “Look, the Christian lady really wants it!” scenes. It’s delicately erotic. The first half of the movie is decent enough, because Coppola, instead of portraying the school as a collection of lonely harpies going crazy from sexual denial, instead shows them to be mostly bored. The war is dangerous and scary, but mostly it has cut them off from life. They’re excited by Mc. Burney’s presence because he’s a sexy firecracker thrown into the doldrums of war, and one way or another they all want to touch that crackling candle.

Kidman makes Martha plausibly conflicted — a part of her wants to get close to Mc. Burney, and she also wants to get him healed and out the door — while Alicia (Elle Fanning), the mischievous teenage brat, keeps flashing her saucy smile at him. There’s a good chuckle to be had in Fanning’s delivery of the line, “I hope you like apple pie!”Mc. Burney, it turns out, does like apple pie, but he falls for the pretty but dowdy teacher Edwina, played by Kirsten Dunst as a quiet lump of sadness.

His attention perks her right up, and when it looks as if his leg is healing and his stay at the school is coming to an end, he blurts out his love for her (because he may not have another chance). But it’s not as if their bond draws us in emotionally.

Nothing in the movie does. Then comes the moment that changes everything: Mc.

Burney’s act of betrayal. It’s right up there, for all of us to see, yet as staged it has little power; Coppola, as director, all but throws it away. It’s an odd choice, but it’s telling, because at that moment “The Beguiled” reveals the kind of movie it really is: not a roiling, dramatic, tempestuous one but, in fact, a rather schematic one. The amputating of Mc. Burney’s leg is the central event of the story, and in the 1. Here, though, it actually manages to be vague.

As presented, the motivation of Kidman’s Martha is muddled (it’s hard to buy her stake in the vengeance), and as a result the movie’s whole sense of comeuppance turns coldly ideological and abstract. Mc. Burney did something he shouldn’t, but he’s really being punished for The Sins Of Men. Sofia Coppola has long been a filmmaker who divides critics and audiences. I count myself as a Coppola believer (I even liked her Hollywood art ramble “Somewhere”), 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’s 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. Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (competing), May 2. Running time: 9. 4 MIN. Production. A Focus Features release of an American Zoetrope production.

Producers: Roman Coppola, Sofia Coppola, Youree Henley. Executive producers: Robert Ortiz, Fred Roos, Anne Ross.

Crew. Director, screenplay: Sofia Coppola. Camera (color, widescreen): Philippe Le Sourd. Buy Man Underground (2017) Online. Editor: Sarah Flack. With. Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning, Oona Laurence, Angourie Rice, Addison Reicke, Wayne Per.