Screened as part of NZIFF 2017

The Beguiled 2017

Directed by Sofia Coppola Big Nights

Colin Farrell plays a wounded Civil War mercenary under the care of a commune of young women, led by Nicole Kidman, in Sofia Coppola’s beautiful, feminist take on Don Siegel’s 1971 Southern Gothic psychodrama.

USA In English
94 minutes DCP

Director

Producers

Youree Henley
,
Sofia Coppola

Screenplay

Sofia Coppola. Based on the novel by Thomas Cullinan and the screenplay by Albert Maltz
,
Grimes Grice

Photography

Philippe Le Sourd

Editor

Sarah Flack

Production designer

Anne Ross

Costume designer

Stacey Battat

Music

Phoenix

With

Colin Farrell (Corporal McBurney)
,
Nicole Kidman (Miss Martha)
,
Kirsten Dunst (Edwina)
,
Elle Fanning (Alicia)
,
Oona Laurence (Amy)
,
Angourie Rice (Jane)
,
Addison Riecke (Marie)
,
Emma Howard (Emily)
,
Wayne Pére (captain)
,
Matt Story (Confederate soldier)
,
Joel Albin (cavalry soldier)

Festivals

Cannes (In Competition) 2017

Awards

Best Director
,
Cannes Film Festival 2017

Elsewhere

Sofia Coppola was crowned Best Director at Cannes this year for arguably her best film to date: a crisp, unsettling, absolutely essential remake of Don Siegel’s 1971 oddity starring Clint Eastwood. Everything about this new interpretation beguiles, from its exciting cast of fresh and familiar faces, to its unexpected jabs of humour, to its almost shocking sense of brevity – though above all else, it is Coppola’s gaze that enthrals, placing female desire and self-preservation at the film’s tipping point. — Tim Wong

“In Sofia Coppola’s elegantly spare, psychosexual Civil War drama The Beguiled, a wounded Union soldier, Colonel John McBurney (Colin Farrell), is discovered in the surrounding woods of a Virginia all-girls seminary school, circa 1864. Reluctantly taking him into their sprawling Southern Gothic estate... the girls and women of the property, overseen by headmaster Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman) slowly begin to vie for the attention of this enemy from the other side, conveniently laid up with a bum leg just down the hall from their bedrooms...

The Eastwood version was a kinky joke of a psychodrama: a retrograde curiosity about a gaggle of repressed, sheltered Confederate belles being seduced by the manliest Yankee of them all... Coppola deepens the material’s implicit wellsprings of loneliness and longing, mitigating the sexism by diverting the point of view away from McBurney to the women he’s attempting to manipulate...

It’s a magnificently shot movie, and often a very funny one, as tense dinners with the stranger from the North transform into duels of innuendo.”— A.A. Dowd, AV Club