The Beguiled, based on novel by Thomas Cullinan

The Beguiled, based on novel by Thomas Cullinan

The Beguiled was nominated for the most important prize in the cinema world, at least in this cine amateur’s view.

                Le Palme D’Or is the nec plus ultra

The Academy Awards get much more attention, of course, but the merit of the Cannes Festival is superior.

The Beguiled has not won the gold medal, which went to the much more provocative Swedish…

                The Square

Sofia Coppola is an established, accomplished, smart, intuitive, creative, celebrated director of films like:

The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette and the classic, triumphant, spectacular, sad Lost in Translation

                For The Beguiled she received the Cannes Festival award for Best Director.

                This film is inspired by the older production, with Clint Eastwood in the leading role of the wounded corporal.

In this, newer version, Corporal McBurney is portrayed by Colin Farrell, acting opposite Nicole Kidman

Interestingly, this a second collaboration in a short time, for the actors who have been together on the set of the outlandish

                The Killing of a Sacred Deer, also nominated for the Palme D’Or

Corporal McBurney had been fighting for the Union Army in the American Civil War and he had been wounded.

To escape, he had ran away and found some refuge on the property of Miss Martha Farnsworth aka Nicole Kidman

The Seminary uses the mansion for Young Ladies and one of the girls there finds the suffering corporal, resting near a tree.

Miss Farnsworth is brave, perseverant and helps the wounded man survive, by extracting the lead from his leg wound and then sawing it to cure it.

However, this is Virginia and the ladies are on the side of the Confederate Army, isolated in the mansion, but considering how to give this enemy combatant into the hands of the soldiers fighting for the South.

Considering the state he is in, Martha Farnsworth says they must show pity or compassion, according to Milan Kundera, the latter presupposes equality and the former implies a feeling of superiority.

In his classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the magic author explains that we feel only pity, for someone we deem beneath us.

The atmosphere is tense, the rooms are dark and dilapidated, the war has had a terrible impact on this former glorious mansion.

Apart from Miss Farnsworth, there is a teacher called Edwina aka Kirsten Dunst and five girl students.

Martha, Edwina and the older of the girls, Alicia, all become interested, if apparently at different degrees, in the man in the house.

Corporal McBurney is recovering very well and he talks in admiring terms to Edwina, but also the others.

He even declares that this woman is the most beautiful he had ever seen and that he fell in love with her.

Nevertheless, one night, when most people in the house are asleep, Edwina is walking in the corridor.

She hears moaning and enters the room only to see the corporal and the teenage Alicia embracing with passion.

The man walks quickly out, trying to talk to the woman he had said he admired so much, only to clash with her.

She pushes the disappointing lover and he falls down the stairs, injuring his already damaged leg beyond repair.

Martha declares there is nothing she can do to fix the leg and unless they cut it off, the man would die.

And then Things Fall Apart and an open conflict has women, if not all of them, on one side and the man on the other…