does she have a race problem

motives in choosing to ditch the prominent slave character, [sic]

In the face of criticism, Coppola has been at pains to point out that her decision to drop the slave character was not one she took lightly. In a recent interview with this paper, she explained how she wrestled with it: “I didn’t want to have a stereotypical character that wouldn’t have been respectful to that history… And to not brush over it would have taken another film altogether. But I thought a lot about it. I was aware there was a decision to make.”

It’s unfortunate though that her simple decision to explain away the absence of slavery in the opening reels feels about as “brushing over it” as it comes. By not showing the ladies in the seminary as slave owners, the effect is to make her female protagonists more sympathetic to modern audiences and also to minimalise the racial dimension that was the stand-out aspect of the Siegel / Eastwood collaboration.

The 1971 version sees one of the girls who is tilling the land complain about doing “nigger work.” Mae Mercer who plays the slave Hallie is the first to have to wash McBurney, farms the land and also in her conversations with the soldier compares the situation of a soldier, willing to die for someone else, to that of a slave. She may seem implausibly assertive, but she represents a moment where slaves are about to be given their freedom, and so is shown as not being limited by her station. It’s far from a perfect depiction of a slave, but it’s to his credit that Siegel is not afraid to tackle the race question; indeed it’s as important an aspect of his film as McBurney’s sexual manipulation of the girls.

Moreover, whether Hallie is a stereotype or not, and perhaps Coppola sees her as so, it doesn’t follow that for Coppola to include her in her new version would have meant having a “stereotypical character that wouldn’t have been respectful to that history.” After all, much of the praise for Coppola’s film has centred on her ability to make

the female characters of the book and earlier film more real and rounded. Why couldn’t she have done that for the story’s sole black woman as well?

Instead, failing to properly acknowledge the fact that her heroines would have had certain beliefs and status because they owned slaves, Coppola disrespects history - a history that still courses through race relations in America today. The shame is that she is surely a filmmaker with enough confidence and nous to reinterpret the stereotype of black female slaves, but she chose not to.

When it comes to whitewashing, we’ve been here before with Coppola. Her last cinema release, The Bling Ring, was slammed once again for excising people of colour. The undocumented Mexican immigrant, Tamayo was part of the real-life L.A. gang of teenage thieves, but this character was omitted from Coppola’s film. And the Asian-American ringleader on whose recount the film is based is given no precedence or position above the fellow white gang-members.

You might argue: why should she be forced to depict the experiences of people of colour if she feels she can’t do them justice? But that’s no excuse, when you have specifically sought out material with a racial element. Of all the stories she might have told about female coming-of-age, why choose one set during the American Civil War, based on a book where a slave character is prevalent, if you’re not interested in race? She could just have easily wrote that story in a modern context, at a high school or chosen a historical period, such as with Marie Antoinette where race is not a subtext.

The funny thing is, I think of all the auteur directors working in Hollywood today, she should understand race and racial dynamics more than most. After all her father, Francis Ford Coppola, made The Godfather, that legendary series of films about immigrants and the attempt by the ‘other’ to make it in an America that is structured to put White Anglo-Saxon Wasps at the top of the pyramid. Meanwhile

white privilege is an implicit target through her work. The ‘villain’ of Lost in Translation, a character reportedly based upon Coppola’s ex-husband Spike Jonze, is a movie director so obsessed with his own status that he completely ignores his wife. In Marie Antoinette her anachronistically poppy biopic of the ‘Let Them Eat Cake’ queen, her husband Louis XVI is a sexless imbecile. In Somewhere, a successful actor lives an empty, vacuous existence at the Chateau Marmont despite having all the advantages in the world. In The Bling Ring the celebrities don’t even notice that their valuables have gone missing.

These are all depictions of people hermetically sealed off, refusing to engage with the world beyond their own narcissistic experience. It’s unfortunate then that Coppola seems to be in part guilty of the same myopia. She is a member of the entitled, who can pick or choose how she engages with the experience of others. She is part of the very problem that her films purport to criticise.

The Beguiled is in cinemas now

Photo captions:
* The all-white cast of the Beguiled, including Nicole Kidman and Kirsten Dunst
* Sofia Coppola on the set of 'The Beguiled'
* The slave character of Hallie in the original 1971 film by Don Siegel
* Colin Farrell and Kirsten Dunst in Coppola's 'The Beguiled'
* Emma Watson in 'The Bling Ring', another whitewashed Coppola film