1864 American Civil War.

In Southern territory, near a boarding house for girls from good families, the very young Amy, while picking mushrooms, finds a Northerner seriously wounded in the leg.

She decides to rescue him and helps him to the building in the middle of the woods where the ladies and damsels present will care for him.

Miss Martha Farnsworth, finds herself in a compromising situation between the danger of having a man in the house, a Union soldier moreover, and the sense of duty that requires her to offer help.

She will personally treat Corporal John McBurney's wound, while the other gentle and elegant maidens of the facility try to be scrupulously participatory in the unforeseen situation between classes of the delicate and refined teacher Miss Edwina.

Above all, the danger is to conceal the presence of the foreign, "inconvenient" guest from the Southern troops, who often control the area.

The remake of The Good Night of Private Jonathan, is just a pretext Coppola uses to portray the mystery whose code the male cannot even imagine: the female world.

Outside men play at toy soldiers, waging war; inside women play with dolls and "baby dolls."

During more or less civilized conflicts it is known that women are objects of rape, so one must be very careful and above all sublimate the body through the torment of perfection and composure, while erotic desire plays in the unpredictability of a presence that becomes immobile and precisely for this reason desirable.

In this boarding school/internship, the presence of "other than study" becomes apparent; Christian charity is but a devious tool to "lead the soldiers not into temptation," and it is necessary to pray with the corporal before sleeping and it is necessary to reflect on his presence.

"Babette's" elegantly packaged lunches for the stranger represent a smug surrender to the space of desire that is such only because it is always deferred.

Then again, there are those who know that "we all do things we never imagined," and while the ladies have learned the corporal's lesson namely that the enemy is not what one thought, nevertheless the same ladies are quick to become those "avenging whores" as the unsuspected soldier/enemy calls them as soon as they disregard his manly expectations..

There goes the civil war at home, and the longest, worldwide, eternal, atavistic war without peace treaties becomes that between the soldier and the doll.

And war is made of flesh, and if "courage is only what the moment requires," dolls can become of icy porcelain.

And while death "becomes beautiful" and anatomy books serve to put " the dots in a straight line," the sophisticated humor that accompanies the film moves Coppola forward, with mischievous directness, to the point of convergence.

Deception restores legitimacy to the perversity of play: a dry exercise in style frames a conceptual and structural balance to the dynamics of artistic creation.

Eroticism, desire, fable, agon; grainy dilation of an obvious if invisible condition: the rude love between the doll and the soldier.

"A woman who knows how to be a woman also knows how to play with her mask, knows how to play with the feminine semblance, knows how to be the 'symptom of a man,' which means that she knows how to enjoy holding the position of the object in the masculine phantom," Lacan argued, and Coppola knows how to describe very well the self-castration of the doll, who in "The Virgin Suicides" even decides for self-elimination. And this is because male jouissance is governed by a fetishistic phantasm while female jouissance is brutalized in the face of the headless brutality of phallic jouissance.

The civil war rewritten by the director features two continents adrift, male jouissance and female desire, which do not harmonize because they cannot; there is no possibility of reconciliation between them except in the hypocrisy constructed by the culture industry.

The "sexual relationship does not exist," said Lacan; there is the encumbrance of the phallus that constrains the nightmare of having."

These egregiously portrayed women are confronted with their dilemmas that make it possible for them to encounter the rough truth of their unconscious desire without, however, ever claiming to guide them toward an ideal of normality that does not exist.

Coppola revels in playing with all this, creating a refined ironic at times sarcastic fresco of the woman/man condition; an often (in)civil, undeclared war of mutual enslavement but above all played out on the impervious instance of one's own I.

23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice