Beguiled (movie 2017) ...the mixed charms and appeals of the supposedly irresistible

​   Beguiled in an arthouse historical take on #MeToo. Or…Beguiled is a Southern Gothic version take on #MeToo. Or some combination of both. Coppola was vehemently opposed to labeling this movie as feminist, but it certainly walks and talks like one.
   This movie (and fun aside, literary the worst movie to watch after eating mushroom based meal as I did) is an adaptation of a novel I’ve never heard of and not even the first one of those. Featuring a nearly all female cast, languid pace and a dreamy setting of antebellum south almost entirely unscathed by war (which is in its third year), it’s easy to see how and why it’s a Coppola movie. She even dragged her muse Kirsten Dunst into it, in a role of a biracial character no less, raising no small amount of controversy for whitewashing the story. (Which Coppola has somehow managed to turn into a good thing as in she said she was doing it to avoid a negative representation of a biracial character…whaaa, seriously? because that’s how representation works? only positive? that’s just silly and literally the opposite of diversity). So yeah, whitewashing…something no director would dare to do in 2021, but apparently still got away with in 2017.
    The movie, in something of a departure for Coppola, has some thrilleresque undertones, but mostly it’s a drama still as is her specialty. In a plantation style seminary a group of young girls is taken care of by the ever snow queenish Nicole Kidman and her younger, milder and dreamier assistant/teacher Dunst. The girls are charming, precocious and well behaved as proper young southern ladies would be, with exception of the eldest (played by the perfectly cast perennial model tall childwoman Elle Fanning) who is somewhere in her teen years and is appropriately vampy and rebellious about it.
    One day while out collecting mushrooms one of the youngest girls finds a wounded Yankee soldier. The idea would be to turn him into the Southern Army, occasionally passing through, but alas these women are so starved for male attention and Colin Farrell is so handsome, charming and initially helpless and thus nonthreatening that they all become positively beguiled by him.
    And he becomes something of a dream potential for the ladies as they project their wishes/dreams/appetites onto him. For Kidman he is sex personified, you can practically see her artic visage ripple with desire when she’s near him. For Dunst he stirs her romantic bones with a seeming promise of taking her away to a different life she so longs for. And for Fanning he’s the teenage girl fantasy.
    Being a male (a gender MeToo has rendered with wide brushstrokes as predatory, lewd and variously evil), Colin goes and makes the worst choice possible and pays for it. Because these ladies, long rendered helpless by their time and place, can in fact and do take care of themselves. Girl power and all that.
    So yes, absolutely a feminist movie. Slow pretty melodrama with some darker undertones, but really nothing special, outside of acting and cinematography. At least it had the decency to be reasonably quick about it, unlike so many similar movies. But beguiling? Not really.