The Beguiled

I saw the original Don Siegel movie with Clint Eastwood when I was in my teens and I was deeply disturbed by Geraldine Page's Miss Martha, headmistress of a boarding school for girls during the American Civil War. I'm pretty sure I didn't understand squat, but I could still sense that beneath her steely demeanor there was something very perverse going on. I have yet to see it again, but in the meantime, I cannot fathom why Sofia Coppola was given the best director prize at Cannes for her remake this year, unless for shameless tokenism.
I guess that Coppola wanted to retell this bizarre sexual cat and mice tale through the female gaze, an idea with enormous potential. I can imagine what a gritty, ruthless filmmaker like Lucrecia Martel (La Ciénaga) could do with this material.
Alas, Coppola's effete version is neither atmospheric, nor claustrophobic, nor creepy, nor disturbing, nor suspenseful, nor horrific, nor particularly interesting. It takes a lot of pointless effort to strip a Southern Gothic of camp and charisma, but that's what happens. Her actresses went to great lengths to perfect their genteel Southern accents, but none of them seem to have any concept of what it felt like to be from the South, and what that war meant to their world of cotillions and slaves. There is no real sense of loss, or humiliation, not even after Miss Martha (Nicole Kidman, miscast and misdirected) explains that her school once used to be a grand old antebellum mansion. No effort is made to impress on the audience what it meant for a woman alone to take on that job: much-diminished circumstances. There is no hunger for the world, no desperation. Instead, it all looks and feels like a Laura Ashley catalog. Coppola is not invested in psychological motivation, or in ambiguity. Hence, the reaction of the women at the arrival of a handsome wounded Yankee soldier is completely superficial. It's desire lite.
Now, if a wounded enemy soldier (the vulnerable, wounded male, an object of female fantasies since time immemorial) shows up at a secluded boarding school for girls in bloom and this soldier happens to be Clint Eastwood, people of all genders will understand how this could wreak havoc in all those straitlaced young bosoms. Had it been Michael Fassbender, that school would have exploded in a ball of fire the moment he crawled through the door. But Coppola makes the mistake of giving the honors to Colin Farrell, who is simply not worth the trouble. To be fair to him and to the rest of the good actors in this movie, Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst (excellent), Elle Fanning and a gaggle of solid young actresses, it's not their fault. They have only been instructed to play the top note, and this story is all about the murky notes at the bottom, what oozes beneath those stuffy crinolines, what really flutters in the women's wildest hearts.

The Lobster

I am a big fan of Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos. Before he made the more expensive The Lobster, Lanthimos delivered elegant, deeply unsettling high-concept movies with very modest budgets (Dogtooth, Alps). You could not stop thinking about these movies. They are like a punch in the gut.
Now that he has a stab at more resources and an English-speaking cast, I'm sad to report the result is disappointing. It's not that he has sold out. The Lobster is still too hermetic and independent to be commercial, but it lacks the sharp brilliance of his other two films.
Still, it is far more original than most movies. Set in a dystopian world in which people who are not part of a couple are persecuted, it follows David, a chubby, miserable architect, (Colin Farrell) who after being dumped by his wife, ends up at a hotel where people go to find a significant other. If they don't succeed, they are relegated to a bizarre fate. Whereas Dogtooth and Alps were fables in which we discovered an alternate reality at odds with people's commonplace surroundings, The Lobster takes place in the near future. Here we are squarely in a sci-fi fantasy world. The shocking contrast between what looks like reality in people's minds and the surreal is lost.
In essence, The Lobster is a one-joke movie that repeats itself way past the punchline. Lanthimos and his writing partner, Efthymis Filipou, imagine the rules of this society in great detail, but the movie remains an intellectual, conceptual game, rather than an emotionally compelling story.
The screenwriters observe how bizarrely we act when we are in love, and take the absurd demands we place on the objects of our affection (or affliction) and they exaggerate our misguided expectations ad absurdum. They magnify our obsession with perfect compatibility to darkly comic results. The problem is that they get stuck defining the myriad rules of this universe and are hamstrung by their constraints. They are so busy setting up this world, and articulating the rules, they lack the imagination to liberate their story from them. And so, if the first third of the movie is exhilarating in its originality, the rest is explanation and repetition. Some of the rules seem arbitrary, some are forgotten along the way, and some seem unnecessary. Lanthimos has always had a knack for shocking, controlled violence, but here he uses it more liberally, and the shock is more vulgar. The movie is heavy-handed and literal and the late onset love story which is supposed to move us seems trite and puny.
The Lobster is strangely lifeless. Still, it is gorgeously shot, it has a powerful classical music soundtrack, and it has the wonderful Rachel Weisz and Lanthimos' usual collaborator Ariane Labed, who bring as much life as they can to the forced tableaux. Colin Farrell does his best to disappear but brings no nuance to his role. Ben Whishaw is sharper, and the great John C. Reilly is wasted. The movie has flashes of beauty and brilliance, and a cool ending which neatly ties up the giant metaphor we've been watching for two long hours. But is this what happens when money comes knocking?
Say it isn't so.