The Virgin Suicides

viewed May 14, 2000 at the UA Colma

For full information about this film, click here

A film that in its essence embodies the '70s because it feels like it leads nowhere.  However, it is an amazingly beautiful film to watch, creating a trance-like state through its soft-focus 70s visuals and narrative that meanders around the tragic fates of a quintet of terminally beautiful sisters governed by an overbearing, warden-like mother.  It's a '70s that director Sophia Coppola (who can't be much older than me) remembers more in her dreams than from her experiences, so that the result is a fetishistic view of the age, and of immaculate girlhood.  We learn hardly anything about the reasons why the Lisbon girls kill themselves other than the superficial reason that their parents were overbearing.  Kathleen Turner and James Woods play these cardboard roles with a sliver of their respective talents.

It would seem that Coppola cares less about doing detective work than striking a mood, but she adroitly finds an indirect but important route to shed light on the tragedy: the boys.  The film's finest pieces of storytelling are told through the boys who loved and lusted after the girls (these passages are narrated wonderfully by Giovanni Ribisi), but could only do so from a distance.  Only they show genuine concern for the girls' emotional well-being; only they can share their feeling of what it's like to be young, energetic and held back.   They obsess over articles they acquire one way or another from the girls, letting their imaginations build altars of immaculate girlhood beauty that no reality can uphold.  The illusion is lifted for one boy who is lucky enough to score a night in heaven on the football field with the eldest daughter (an impossibly dreamy Kirsten Dunst) only to have that image tainted (and don't you hate the use of the word "tainted" in sentences with sexual meaning?).  That moment sheds light on the whole tragic situation: the boys, while well-meaning, are as much implicated in the deaths as are the parents.  The Lisbon girls are hopelessly stuck in a world that puts them on a pedestal, to be adored, protected, and doomed once exposed to reality.  

Home