Life During Wartime. Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled.

In Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled, a film which won the director’s prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, each of the women around which the film revolves look like a variation on the same, all blonde and stringy. In the cinema of 2017 this would, more often than not (and probably has been), be picked up on as something of a negative, but here it only adds to the otherworldly feeling of a space and time on the verge of encountering original sin. Man is dropped in to this female space, by matter of chance, with an injured soldier for the other side found upon the property.

As with the director’s earlier Marie Antoinette, The Beguiled is a work of jarring juxtapositional forces, at once lit by candlelight, but scored by contemporary Parisian pop-group Phoenix. At the centre of the film sits a woozy party, a sequence that echoes so many of those in Coppola’s oeuvre of disaffected personnel.

“The sound of gunfire off in the distance, I’m getting used to it now”.

We’re three years in to the American civil war, and the noise of the conflict is a constant in the world of The Beguiled. Distance is everything. The men at war are rarely seen but through the fencing that seals off the ladies school from the outside world, and it’s only when the picture closes that we go beyond the gates for a closing portrait of the damned inside the school. It’s a closing image that is typically well-realised for that most confident of young American filmmakers.