Film Review: The Beguiled (2017)

A little girl weaves in and out of the shadows of trees in Virginia, digging her fingers into the earth and picking mushrooms, before stumbling across a bloodied Union soldier. It sets the mood — dark, visceral and gritty (especially by costume drama standards) — for Sofia Coppola’s remake of the 1971 movie.

Deserter John McBurney (Colin Farrell) finds himself transported from the horrors of battle to the perhaps even more brutal world of a girls’ school, where two teachers (Nicole Kidman and Kirsten Dunst) and five students (including Elle Fanning) live in intense isolation, waiting for news of the outside world, breath baited in fear (and, in some cases, anticipation) at the thought that Union soldiers may attack, rob from them and rape them.

The film does a beautiful job of bringing us into these women’s world. They stitch, cook, garden with visible effort, compared to the lacklustre embroidery efforts we’re used to seeing in film adaptations of nineteenth-century works. The school’s slaves have fled. There are no men. We almost feel the effort as the girls pump water or lift the hoe.

The lighting is also incredible. The candles aren’t just period props but appear to be the only source of light, giving the film the appearance of a Gothic painting, with girls, dressed in white, flitting through the shadows. The camerawork puts us in the position of a voyeur, peeping into the house and spying from behind tree branches.

Where then does the movie go so wrong?

Despite a talented cast and the gorgeous production, the movie feels vapid. Characters are underdeveloped, motivations unclear, and the dynamics between the women, which have real promise in the early scenes after McBurney’s arrival, go undeveloped. The story has little more depth than the film’s overly revealing trailer and, consequently, there’s no emotional payoff to match the atmosphere.

Dunst and Farrell in particular struggle to make something of their characters’ few lines of feeble backstory and we’re left with so many questions that it’s hard to see this world as three-dimensional at all. It’s more compelling as a series of beautiful tableaux, the viewer’s imagination creating what the filmmakers could not.

What did you think of the 2017 The Beguiled? Let me know — here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Traces of Angria and Gondal

The 5^th of June 1826 was a seminal day in the Bronte household. It was the day Patrick Bronte brought his children — Charlotte (10), Branwell (9), Emily (7) and Anne (6) — a set of toy soldiers, which were to become a major part of their literary development.

More accurately, Patrick bought the soldiers for Branwell, the boy, but Charlotte describes how all four children immediately claimed a soldier. Charlotte named hers after the Duke of Wellington, a hero of hers, so of course Branwell chose to favour Bonaparte. Emily’s doll was dubbed ‘Gravey’ for his grave expression and the baby of the family, Anne, found her soldier demoted with the title ‘Waiting Boy’.

The children’s playacting with the soldiers soon turned to written outputs. They crafted tiny books and magazines (such as the one the Secret Victorianist saw at the Morgan Library’s exhibition), designed to be small enough for their dolls to read. And they created worlds — first the Glass Town Confederacy, then Angria, and then, when Emily and Anne became frustrated with their lesser creative roles in the latter’s development, the younger siblings’ world, Gondal.

Glass Town, Angria and Gondal were an incredible blend of the real and imagined, combining the Brontes’ riotous creativity with what they knew of the outside world (its politics, geography and emotional dramas). And the sagas they sparked extended well beyond their childhoods, with creative production of prose and poetry continuing into the group’s twenties. In fact it’s occasionally proved difficult for scholars to identify which of Emily’s poems are Gondal poems and which were inspired by personal feelings, unsurprising given the importance of these worlds to the siblings and the unfortunate loss of all the Gondal prose.

It’s tempting to see the Brontes’ choices of soldiers as indicative of their personalities and later creative outputs. Charlotte, who picked the hero, remains foremost in our thoughts today, Branwell plays the villain, Emily has become a gloomy symbol of the Gothic moors and Anne can’t quite shake her reputation as the quiet one.

It’s easy to read Bronte juvenilia and look for traces of the famous novels the sisters in the family would go on to produce, but, perhaps, we should look for traces of these wild, passionate, collaborative worlds in the stories we’ve grown so familiar with — not be awed by what’s often been judged ‘genius’ but instead see children, playing with their dolls.

What would you like to see the Secret Victorianist write about next? Let me know — here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.