In Which We Encounter Sofia Coppola's Darkest Mood

Visitor Man

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Beguiled
dir. Sofia Coppola
94 minutes

An elegy for the Confederacy may not be the most politically appropriate theme these days, but Sofia Coppola is unafraid. She is willing to turn anything, even the War Between the States, into a fulcrum of boredom. The Beguiled, a remake she conceived at the behest of her close friend in tone deafness, Quentin Tarantino, turns the story of a runaway Union soldier into a two hour admiration of Colin Farrell's body by a group of eight women with ages ranging from 11 to 50. The resulting feature film feels like reading a novella; it is really over before it has even begun.

Speaking of Colin Farrell's body, his legs are hairy but his torso is mostly hairless. He has clearly dieted down for this important role. Matted hair covers the lower part of his face, and his left leg contains shrapnel and a vertical cut of three or four inches. Ill or well, he is the central figure of The Beguiled. Despite being a movie with a bunch of women living together, where they might have friendships or conflicts, we find nothing of that here. I guess the reason is that they are literally beguiled by Farrell, even though he is a little old for them, speaks with an Irish accent, and is quick to anger.

Coppola's trailer for The Beguiled was rather exciting, but after viewing the final product, you realize it is one of those trailers that disappointingly captures the entire movie. I don't mean this in a metaphorical or casual manner, either: this piece of promotional material even includes the final scenes from the film. Probably Coppola was afraid no one would go see the movie if they thought it was about a bunch of women flirting with Colin Farrell; they had to have some darker intent for him, like ghosts or at least sustained violence.

The Beguiled moves at a breakneck pace through its non-plot. Nicole Kidman is a bit overly familiar as the head of this small girls' school, and her lack of subtlety or verve indicates she does not have much to offer in this role. We never learn much about her, except that she is willing to completely give herself over to a man she barely knows. As her second in command, Kirsten Dunst continues to show how much she has grown as a performer over the past decade, and Coppola wisely gives her most of the action in the film.

Directing younger actresses is Ms. Coppola's forte, and expanding the role of Oona Lawrence, who plays the young woman who finds Farrell dying below a tree, would have probably added a lot here. Instead we have to watch the ghastly spectre of Elle Fanning making out with an unconscious Farrell as he recovers in the house's music room. Except for Dunst, none of these women possess any inner life, and that is the greatest disappointment of The Beguiled. Rather than develop these characters and their relationships, The Beguiled is more focused on establishing a definite mood, of a cocooned hideaway impervious to happening of any kind.

Between every scene, Coppola cannot help but show the overgrown property of the girls' school in the gloaming. Without music for the vast majority of the film, the sounds of crickets and birds make up the overwhelming portion of the soundtrack. This is an effective way of building tension; unfortunately it never really leads to much. Farrell's soldier recovers and begins gardening; as soon as he is on two feet he is on the verge of convincing the women to stay when he is caught in Elle Fanning's room. Two scenes of violence, accidental and then intentional, follow.

The metaphor for the fate of the American south is sure laid on thick here. It is a Northerner's understanding of that place. Even these women, who are ostensibly future wives of the Confederacy, all speak with their own accents. Coppola understands that the audience for her films has no desire to witness versimilitude. This is the South in name only. Stripped of any substance or agency, the women of The Beguiled move to and fro as if in a dollhouse. It is all too obvious none of this is real.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

In Which We Lop All The Chandeliers

Peasants

by MOLLY O'BRIEN

The Bling Ring
dir. Sofia Coppola
115 minutes

Seven years ago, Sofia Coppola made a movie called Marie Antoinette. Spoiler alert: at the end of the movie, Marie Antoinette gets robbed in a pretty major way. The peasants storm the château, ruin her stuff, make off with her head. We don’t get to see the revolutionaries lopping the chandelier from the ceiling, just the shot of a bunch of crystals in pieces on the ground.

A couple years ago, a handful of upper-middle-class teenagers burgled the homes of Hollywood people like Orlando Bloom, Megan Fox, and Audrina Partridge. Then, on a tip from a classmate who heard them bragging about stealing Rachel Bilson’s shit, they were arrested. Nancy Jo Sales covered the hullabaloo for Vanity Fair in an article called “The Suspects Wore Louboutins”; in the full-length book that came after the article, she compared the teenagers’ thievery to the 18th century peasants who stormed Versailles.

Coppola must have noticed the connection. In The Bling Ring, the chandelier is back up, sparkling over a rack of cocktail dresses and Louis Vuitton jewelry cases as a small gaggle of girls (plus one boy) scavenge for treasure in Paris Hilton’s mansion. Our contemporary Marie Antoinettes appear in a montage of pixelated TMZ snapshots. The peasants take selfies and put them up on Facebook with captions like “Who’s stepping out with me tonight :)” and “Wanna smoke a bluuunt?”

First: The Bling Ring has more than a few funny moments. The comedy, intermittent though it may be, is the product of the actors, most of them unknowns, who spout marblemouthed adolescent blandishments as if programmed to do so. “That’s chilllll,” they say. “I love Chanellllll.” “So hottt.” “Ooh, this is Balmaainnn,” the raspy blonde coos, holding a gunmetal dress up to her abdomen. Watching these actors interact with each other produces the same effect as listening to teenagers talk on subways or park benches: contact embarrassment and intrigue.

They drive to the beach, yelling over Rick Ross’s guest spot on “9 Piece”. They smoke their joints dramatically, shuffle around to EDM in six-inch heels, insult each other’s outfits or tell each other they look sooo hotttttttttt. They are the children of Laguna Beach and The Hills, only less wistful and more nihilistic. You could wreak serious havoc with characters like these.

As an interpretation of a piece of journalism in a glossy magazine, the film is only sporadically faithful. Quotes are reproduced verbatim, and the narrative progresses much in the way Sales documented it — Marc (Israel Broussard) meets cute, troubled Rebecca (Katie Chang), Rebecca introduces Marc to celebrity kleptomania, more people get involved, everyone gets caught, Marc spills the whole story. But for readers of the Sales story, something is missing.

One major element of the original Bling Ring story absent from the movie is the reality television factor. Alexis Neiers, the young woman who appears as “Nicki” in the film and whom Emma Watson plays, was being filmed for an E! reality show called Pretty Wild at the time of the burglaries, though for reasons that had nothing to do with the burglaries. Her apprehension and trial were major plot points on the show. Real-life Neiers, as she appears on Pretty Wild, is actually kind of fascinating. She’s a mess, an addict, a model who saunters around her house with her “sister” Tess, both girls exuding a sexuality that is, in a single word, terrifying.

Everyone knows that reality television isn’t real. Neither are movies. Still, in the vacuum of unreality, movies have the ability to take the idea of a real person and further animate it, tell another side of the story, make that person even more real somehow. The Bling Ring misses this opportunity. Coppola’s version of Neiers is Watson looking cold and brittle in a pink Juicy sweatsuit, executing one excellent spin around a stripper pole that looks like it took three weeks to perfect. Her reality television background is nonexistent; the only camera that follows her around is the camera on her own iPhone.

So if you’re receiving the story firsthand from Coppola, you probably wouldn’t catch anything significant about the delusional nature of reality TV, nor would you know about the complications of Marc’s status as the rat of the investigation. You’d just see the stuff. So much stuff.

The first two-thirds of the movie are devoted to the stuff. The dresses, the gilded bracelets, the piled-on necklaces, the pillows with Paris Hilton’s face on them, the crystal bottles of vodka, the rolled-up wads of cash stuffed in leather trunks and metal cases, the Ziploc baggie of cocaine, the pistol on Megan Fox’s fiancé’s nightstand. It’s all so shiny and beautiful. It turns the audience into magpies. It made me want to go shopping.

We rarely see any of the kids do anything with the stuff. The few scenes when they do — when the crew’s ringleader smiles to herself in the mirror through a mist of perfume, when the initially hesitant Marc tries on a pair of Hilton’s hot pink heels and falls in love with them, when one of the tertiary characters picks up the gun and briefly becomes a maniac—are magic. The rest is just stuff.

Maybe the problem is the lack of suspense. We all saw what happened to the kids. The Antoinettes became victims and received their restitution. Between Sales, Pretty Wild and TMZ, there are no unknowns. Even when a story’s out there, a handful of explosive characters can make for a good story. Coppola defuses them. We know these kids are shallow, vapid, superficial. That’s why we want to watch them. It’s too bad the movie, which could have been dynamite, doesn’t rise above those same descriptors.

Molly O'Brien is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about the king. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

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In Which A Long Long Time Ago

Suicide by Planet

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Melancholia
dir. Lars Von Trier
131 minutes

Melancholia begins with the two stalest of film clichés, presented back-to-back: the end of the world, and a wedding. The nuptials are those of Michael (an absolutely overwhelmed Alexander Skarsgård) and Justine (Kirsten Dunst), who wishes she were anywhere but at her own wedding reception. The camera jumps from person to person in nauseating fashion, wobbling back and forth as if it were almost about to fall off a tripod. We are meant to be viewing things from the distorted perspective of Danish writer-director Lars Von Trier.

Not a single event occurs in Von Trier's Melancholia without rousing some kind of reaction in its audience. Such a maddening display of provocation! Von Trier is obsessed with the theater, the excitement that comes from mixing up the unfamiliar with the predictable. Some of his sketches are kinda funny, others are absolutely turgid. The wedding sequence reaches its nadir when Dunst starts having unprotected sex with a new hire at her advertising company. At the same time, the party's guests learn of a larger planet named Melancholia heading towards Earth at an unbelievable rate.

As the titular planet accelerates towards them, von Trier pulls out every trick imaginable for his blonde protagonist. There is basically not a moment in Melancholia where Kirsten Dunst isn't drunk or in some drug stupor induced to treat her underlying depression. She is so out of it that as the film spirals on, her sister Claire, sleepily portrayed by Charlotte Gainsbourg, is left to carry the action. Anxious and unable to speak above a whisper, I pretty much can't think of a worse person with which to spend the last days of your life.

Von Trier has apologized in advance for Melancholia. In his tongue-in-cheek director's statement on the film, he demurs, "In Visconti, there was always something to elevate matters beyond the trivial...elevate it to masterpieces! I am confused now and feel guilty. What have I done?"

Indeed, Melancholia features many unusual trappings for the director — lavish and austere, his best images resemble the still paintings he sometimes thrusts at the audience. Then again, at times you would have to be convinced that you weren't watching Armageddon or Deep Impact, and it's this synchronicity that has the director second guessing himself. Thankfully, von Trier spoils the will-they die-or-won't-they? tension in the film's dynamic opening: a music video depiction of the planetary collision that lies ahead. What follows in the next two hours is mere anti-climax.

The wedding of Dunst's Justine occupies the entire first hour of Melancholia. It occurs on a large estate ("kitschy" according to von Trier, who finds all trappings of wealth equally absurd) facing an eighteen hole golf course. The preparations for the event are lavishly undertaken by Claire's husband John (Kiefer Sutherland), who we are told has gone to all this trouble as a kind of farewell to his wife's sister: seeing her happily married, he hopes to finally separate the two. Justine makes that impossible by dumping her new husband, quitting her job and squeezing in a nap all in the same evening.

If anyone can play a shitshow, it's Kirsten Dunst. She based fifty percent of her performance here on Bjork in Dancer in the Dark, the rest of the time she simply acts inebriated, swigging from a whiskey bottle and leaning on her dance partners as they fear for her collapse. She is believably crazy, and later on informs her sister that she "knows" that Earth is about to be struck by a planet just as she knows we are all alone in the universe and no one will miss us. It's hard to take this seriously next to slow motion shots of Gainsbourg's young son embracing her. But you weren't taking this seriously, were you?

As with his own estranged biological father, Gainsbourg and Dunst's dad (John Hurt) abandons them twice in the novelistic melodrama. Their mother would like to leave her ungrateful kids, but can't. Children are sheltered and taken care of, but everyone else leaves the person who is supposed to care about them most. For the fatherless von Trier, the idea of psychological subtlety is anathema to his existence. Melancholia is Von Trier laying the basest reflection of his personal trauma on us, and it certainly comes across as more heartfelt than multiple sequences of chicks staring at an approaching planet about to engulf them.

After the wedding, Justine shows up at the estate again, a complete shell of a human being. Her sister cannot even manage to talk her into a bath. It is only the news of Earth's pending destruction that brings her alive again.

Eager to display her "acting chops", Dunst puts on quite the display as she admires the planet with her corporeal form. This topless exhibition is also supposed to be construed as the subtle overshadowing of her sister, who observes her nude forms as violins screech meaningfully on the soundtrack. Perhaps won over by the full frontal, Kiefer Sutherland becomes quick to agree with Dunst's dire conclusions, succumbing more swiftly than he did to the panicked admonitions of his wife.

At the vast but spiritually tiny mansion, horses become restless under the wordly glare of impending doom. Von Trier has placed himself in the position of a master, bluntly delivering a bloated final cut in two parts, each titled after a Lawrence Durrell meme. To meet their planetary destruction head-on, Kirsten, Charlotte and her son Tim construct a weird little monument to death, as if to ward off the bad and embrace the rest. It's not totally unsurprising, but it's a little expected.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about Adrian Lyne's Indecent Proposal. 

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