Coppola The flavor of the day
Coppola Press Conference for The Beguiled, which was not very beguiling -- in fact it sucked. Glossy high budget scraggly story about a wounded soldier taken in by a house fill of femmes, with solid gold cast (Kidman, Farrel, Durst and Fanning) which helps viewers overlook some of the contrivances of the script as the pic falls apart in the second part and becomes an unintentional black comedy instead of the romantic drama it started out as.
Set in a handsome southern mansion near the end of the civil war in 1864 which is serving as a refuge from the war for aristocratic southern girls. A badly handsome wounded Northern soldier (Farrel) is found in the woods near the mansion by one of the younger girls and is brought back to the manse where the young ladies are all enthralled by him and the austere head lady )Kidman) decides that they will nurse him back to health, conceal him from the southern forces all around and keep him as a kind of pet for a while before releasing him to his own devices. The mature woman, especially Kirsten Durst) have the hots for him and all goes along swimmingly until younger Fanning trues to seduce him and Durst catching them in bed together freaks out. A scuffle ensues where Corporal John Rutledge of the Union Army takes a tumble down the stairs which reopens his earlier wound with such damage that no-nonsense head lady Kidman decides the leg must go or he will die. With a saw from the garage she amputates the troubled leg herself and now we're in Ronald Reagan country -- as he wakes up horrified to scream the equivalent of "What happened to the rest of me!" --
Until now an extremely polite guest-POW he turns into a raging bull on crutches terrorizing the entire house with an loaded outsize six-shooter. To calm him down Fanning balls give s him a hot pussy treatment and Kidman declares a gala dinner to bid him a fond farewell. One catch -- And here come the guffaws --The favorite mushroom dish he will be served consists of fast acting poison mushrooms disguised in a savory sauce. Gobble-gobble and he drops dead on the spot without so much as a grimace. The girls carefully sew up a death shroud for him and his corpse in placed on the ground just outside the gate in front of the mansion where, presumably, it will be found by roving southern soldiers and duly disposed of.
Because of her hallowed Coppola surname Sofia has no trouble recruiting top Hollywood talent like Kidman and Farrel or former playmates like Durst and Fanning, even if her filmmaking capacities, while technically sufficient are barely above film school excercises in execution
I didn't think much of her film direction but I fear that am falling in love with Sofia the woman. To me she is far more physically attractive then her stars, Kirsten Dunslt snd Noicole Kidman. Something about her full facedness, juicy lips, and loose loose hair style that makes her look more like a movie star herself than an accredited film director. Sofia Coppola is a very very attractive young woman in her own right.
In the press conference after the screening (viewed on TV monitors as it was too crowded to gain direct access to the conference room) she was asked if this is the kind of feminist film that could only have been made by a woman.
Her answer: "I hate to say this, but do think this could only have been made by a woman, because only women understand what it feels like to be with other woman. When woman are together (as in this houseful of females) they act very differently from the way they act with men or in the presence of men".
Kidman's offered a cascade of remarks that leave no doubt she is a tried and true blue Womens Libber to the hilt and must have enjoyed her surgical turn. One cannot help thinking that Farrel's Surgery in the film was more of a castration than an amputation which he actually exclaims in so many words when he wakens with one leg missing.
Like her new film or not, Sofia Coppola is the big star of day Eight of twelve on the Croisette at The 70th Cannes film festival.
(Geo-Linguistic note: "La Croisette" is the name of the Boulevard along the beach in Cannes which has become synonymous with this film festival. As far as I know no other
street in France bears this name. Appropriately it means 'the crossing' in the endearing diminutive form ~~ definitely the place where all film world paths cross.
