Ultimately, “The Garden Party” is a mood piece, less concerned with the profoundly tricky merging of individuals and families than with the beguilements of summer and of love.

But Coppola is altogether more interested in how the women register their own beguilement, and also how McBurney, with more instinct than calculation, manipulates their sympathies and awakens their repressed desires.

But the deeper beguilement is how she manages to create the effect of wholly realized figures while simultaneously confounding so many of our assumptions about the figurative.

And when Dragan is finally captured, and the townspeople are forced to reckon with their foolish beguilement, her secret emerges.

But to get an unsentimental look at the market for such cases erodes the beguilement of a client base of “plain, ordinary, simple people.”