The story of "Below the Peony" takes place during the American Civil War. A wounded northern soldier played by Colin Farrell, McBurney, was rescued by a little girl from a southern women’s boarding school. His handsome appearance, The female principals, female teachers, and female students in the school spurred their hearts. In order to fight for the only man in this school, they launched a "fighting" drama, but in the end killed the northern soldiers.
Compared with "Being Tricked", "Under the Peony" on the one hand weakens the narrative function of the Civil War as the background of the story, on the other hand, it removes the original standpoint on black slavery and race issues. When McBurney in "Being Tricked" was sent to school by a little girl, there were a few female students in the school who hated the Northern Soldiers and had always opposed them. Not like "Under the Peony", all female students were Attracted by the charm of this man. At the end of the movie, McBurney's body was sent out of the school by a group of them. Compared with "Below the Peony", "Tricked" seemed to have a more symbolic orientation: the North and South people who could not reconcile. Secondly, there is a black female slave character in the original version. She has a tough personality. When McBurney is angry and mad because of a broken leg, she is not afraid of it. "Under the Peony" has the characters mentioned in the play shortly after the opening. And the fact that the slave left the school, after that, there was no topic about black people and race.
However, the depiction of religious beliefs in "Peony Under the Flower" is not in the original version. Teachers and students in this school would pray collectively every night. When the women killed McBurney with poisonous mushrooms, this satirical adaptation still had some thoughts. Especially the fat girl in the movie, when she admired McBurney, gave him a Bible, and finally this "piety" kid proposed a vicious plan to assassinate McBurney. The comparison between before and after is very ironic. .
Sophia Coppola may not want to have too much reference on war and race issues like the original version. Of course, this is understandable, and it can be established, but when she condenses the film more and limits it to one man and multiple women In the relationship between love and love, there is not enough skill and creativity to deepen the delicate and complicated relationship between the love and hate psychology of each woman and the entanglement between them.
The headmistress Martha played by Nicole Kidman, the teacher Edwina played by Kirsten Dunst, and the schoolgirl Alicia in the version of Elle Fanning, these three female roles are in the movie Not as full as the original version, they are more like three masks, representing the three single character symbols of loneliness, impatience, introverted restraint, and exposed coquettish. In "Betrayed", the headmistress Martha has an incestuous relationship with her dead cousin. The female teacher Edwina has a very good relationship with Martha, and she is the successor of the school in Martha's mind. The brushwork of these two plump characters is The "Under the Peony" is not occupied by other writings, but completely eliminated.
A scene in "Being Tricked" that exposes three women each having ghosts was also rewritten in "Under the Peony" to no avail. In "Tricked", Alicia first seduce McBurney in the garden, and then he was bumped into by Edwina. McBurney immediately pushed Alicia away, and then secretly kissed Edwina, Alicia found out Hou Xin was jealous and ran to the door to tie the blue cloth, implying that there was a deserter in the Southern Army School. The female principal Martha secretly tore off the blue cloth as soon as she found out. The scene where Licia opens the door and interferes is designed, and there is no other handwriting.
Regarding the sex scenes in the original version that arrived in the night and candlelight, dreams and psychedelic transitions, "Under the Peony" not only did not transform and upgrade, but was simply and crudely shot. First, I saw McBurney and Ally from Dunster's perspective. West Asia’s affair then pushed him down the stairs in anger. It was a completely unstructured, rhythmic and rhythmic scene scheduling. This scene should have been used to flash the headmistress’s hiding of McBurney like the original. The lust disappears here too.
Compared with the domestic series of Gongdou, this drama of three women is really inferior. A 20-year-old female student, a 30-year-old female teacher, a 40-year-old female principal, and the desire and attitude of three women of different ages towards men have not been portrayed and explored in depth to varying degrees. Even though the audience watched the headmistress mending the blood-red wounds of the man and the metaphorical and psychologically expressive scenes of him wiping the man’s body at the beginning of the movie, in the second half of the saw-leg scene, the movie was replaced with a black screen. Reduce the level of blood and violence, so that it is inevitable that the female principal's cruelty caused by jealousy will be shown more vividly. The meaning of "broken roots" about men implied by the scene of "Suffering" through the scene of broken legs also loses the visual and readable interest in this black screen of "Under the Peony".
"Under the Peony" under the hands of the photographers of "The Great Master", this adaptation has been radiated with sophistication and classicism that the original work did not have, but Sophia Coppola's severe lack of adaptation skills and narrative ability really makes It looks like a running account statement of an event or a murder case, rather than a multi-faceted narration of a full story.
5.24 Written in Cannes,
originally published by Phoenix Entertainment: http://ent.ifeng.com/a/20170526/42937649_0.shtml
View more about The Beguiled reviews
