Sofia Coppola Says “The Beguiled” Is About The Gender Dynamics Of The Confederacy, Not The Racial Ones

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The Civil War–era South is present in every bit of Sofia Coppola’s adaptation of The Beguiled. Cannon fire booms in the background, and Confederate soldiers march by the nearly abandoned all-girls school that acts as the film’s setting. The property on which the Miss Martha Farnsworth Seminary sits is dusty, desolate. Miss Martha (Nicole Kidman) stands guard over the one teacher (Kirsten Dunst) and five young women who remain. Their chickens were stolen by soldiers. All the slaves once kept captive on the property are long gone. During one scene in the film’s third act, Martha reminisces about her Southern life before the war: the parties, the gaiety, the booming social scene of a Southern belle in her prime.
It was precisely this interaction of desolation and Southern confederate femininity that drew Coppola to the project. “I really thought it was interesting because it was a group of women all living together, all different ages with different stages of maturity, and how they interact,” Coppola recently told BuzzFeed News. “It’s a group of women kind of isolated in the world.”