Sofia Coppola directs Kirsten Dunst, Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning in this remake of the Seventies gem about an injured civil war soldier who finds himself the rooster in the henhouse at Southern girls’ school. 

Woozily beautiful, full of creamy prints and faded pastel coloured fabrics. The female performances are uniformly superb but it is Farrell who somewhat surprisingly stands out. As he tries to seduce, befriend, ingratiate himself with the ensemble through inscrutable charm he resembles almost uncannily an old 40s noir femme fatale. Farrell is a stubble strewn Gilda or Phyllis Dietrichson using whatever wiles she can, to twist the more powerful around her finger, whether it be by desire or sympathy – the gender and period are all that are inverted. Whether his manipulations are wholly intentional or his downfall deserved is deliciously left up to us to decide. You do cringe with amusement at his hubris of trying to play quite such a brittle yet cohesive unit off against each other. In all honesty (and it has been decades since I last saw it), I still preferred the Clint / Siegel original and I don’t think this deviates enough to truly justify its existence. But it is a good tale well told, which at least recalibrates to Coppola aesthetic concerns perfectly. The pot simmers nicely and prettily again to an old easy recipe.

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