FEMME FATALES

It’s a shame that a quality film like The Keeping Room gets only limited release in a few select theaters and then disappears without attracting the audience it deserves. Hopefully it will find new life on home video for the lucky viewers who seek it out.

Why the movie was deemed unworthy (meaning unprofitable) for major marketing is anyone’s guess, but I suspect the major impediment was the misleading title. A similar fate befell the 1978 film based on Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, co-winner of the National Book Award in 1975. Director Karel Reisz made a terrific adaptation of the book (with Nick Nolte and Tuesday Weld), but when the film was retitled Who’ll Stop the Rain? after the Creedence Clearwater Revival song, the general public had no idea what the movie was about and mostly ignored it.

Released a month earlier last year than the Oscar-nominated Room, the similarly titled The Keeping Room (2014) has been dubbed by numerous reviewers as a “feminist Western” which is more descriptive than accurate. The plot concerns the struggles facing three young women—two sisters and a slave — as Sherman’s army is sweeping through the South.

The women must cope with the incidental problems of daily existence that are nonetheless monumental enough to drive a neighbor to suicide. When two renegade Yankee soldiers (shown to be brutal rapists and murderers in the film’s opening sequence) discover the whereabouts of the unprotected women, the stakes of survival rise even more precipitately.

Directed by British director Daniel Barber, whose previous film was the excellent urban thriller Harry Brown (2009) with Michael Caine as a geriatric avenger, The Keeping Room is scripted by Julia Hart, her first such credit. The cast is headlined by the remarkable Brit Marling (Another Earth and Sound of My Voice), who often doubles as both screenwriter and actress. One of the very best of today’s independent stars, Marling is always fascinating to watch. Here her character is the mainstay of the three determined survivors, a blonde grittier version of Scarlett O’Hara.

Her teenage sister is played by Hailee Steinfeld of 2010’s True Grit who grows up considerably during the horrendous events of the film. Muna Otaru plays the slave, Mad, who proves she is the equal of her former mistresses. Whether intentional or not, in the film Ms. Otaru physically resembles Butterfly McQueen’s Prissy in Gone with the Wind, though in every other way she is the direct opposite of the earlier film’s flea-brained flibbertigibbet.

Writer Julia Hart has remarked that she had both Night of the Living Dead and Straw Dogs in mind as she wrote The Keeping Room. Those influences are readily evident in the film’s white-knuckle suspense and violence. It is also quite tempting to see the movie as an anti-Romantic version of Gone with the Wind, the earlier classic’s engaging stereotypes replaced with flesh-and-blood characters. In addition to the character of Mad, for instance, the film’s major villain (played by Sam Worthington from Avatar) is even more ruthless than the renegade soldier who attacks Scarlett O’Hara, but he is also given considerably more depth and character.

Watching The Keeping Room reminded me of an earlier film about the Civil War and the South’s fair maidens. The Beguiled (1971) stars Clint Eastwood as a wounded Union soldier who is taken in and cared for by the members of an isolated girls’ school. Adept at spinning lies and adapting to the situation, the charming Yankee at first thinks he is the proverbial fox in a hen house. Presided over by a headmistress (Geraldine Page) fixated on an incestuous relationship with her dead brother and a teacher (Elizabeth Hartman) who is a frustrated virgin, the place of refuge is seething with sexual tension. Not to be outdone by her older superiors, one of the teen girls (Jo Ann Harris) is particularly ready to light the fires.

In the end, however, the ladies (and girls) have something else in mind for the luckless stud.

Though it is more Southern Gothic (in the vein of Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner), The Beguiled is nonetheless an enjoyable companion piece to The Keeping Room, each film demonstrating that Southern women (regardless of race or age) had better not be taken for granted.