Welcome to Sofia Coppola Month on Anne Marie's series "Women's Pictures"...
Over the course of this series, I’ve noticed a pattern. So far, the first films our directors made have been smallish, personal movies; unpolished films that carry the seeds of themes and images that will grow as the directors do. The Virgin Suicides is not that movie. Sofia Coppola’s 1999 first feature film is neither small nor unpolished. While the film carries themes of isolation and adolescence that Coppola will continue to explore throughout her career, this is not the unpolished or underfunded first film of someone still learning the business. Starring two stars on the cusp of breakthrough (Kirsten Dunst and Josh Hartnett), as well as several well-loved actors (Kathleen Turner, James Woods, Danny DeVito), and shot by a cinematographer with 20 years of experience (Edward Lachman), this may be the most well-varnished first film we’ve seen.
Adapted by Coppola from Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel, The Virgin Suicides is a nostalgic suburban gothic. Set in 1970s Detroit, an unnamed narrator reminisces on his high school crush on the girls next door, five sisters who committed suicide for reasons he still can’t understand:
Everyone dates the decline of our neighborhood from the deaths of the Lisbon girls.
The film follows the narrator and his friends as they observe the five Lisbon sisters, the daughters of the conservative Catholic Math teacher Mr. Lisbon (James Woods) and his wife (Kathleen Turner). After Cecilia (Hannah Hall), the yougnest daughter, commits suicide, the family slowly unravels, and the remaining girls grow wilder. Of special interest to almost everyone is the wildest, Lux (Kirsten Dunst). As young love blooms, prom grows nearer, and the neighborhood trees succumb to fungus, the fact of death hangs over the film, rendering the already-precious moments of adolescence even more fleeting.
In their attempts to decipher the mystery of the Lisbon sisters, the group of boys pours over journals, baubles, and possessions, which make up the core visual metaphor of the film. Coppola continuously turns her camera towards the mundane details of the girls’ lives - tampons, lipstick, beads, and books - in order to delve into the girls’ lives. Some of these images are haunting - like Cecilia taping bright bracelets over her wrist bandages after her first suicide attempt. However, most of these brief still-life shots fail to shed much light on the girls’ inner lives. Other than sad Cecilia and restless Lux (given extra life by Hannah Hall and Kirsten Dunst, respectively), the sisters are indistinguishable from each other. In filling her film with these shots, Coppola has, to borrow a quote from Virginia Woolf, “given us a house in the hopes that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there.” Unfortunately, the girls are more important as a unit: blond, beautiful, and doomed.
The Virgin Suicides, despite its title, is not a movie about the Lisbon sisters. This is a movie about the Detroit suburb in which they live, where the auto industry, the trees, and the teenagers are dying. This is a movie about the girls’ adult neighbors, who peer into the Lisbon’s lives displayed on television specials with unempathetic curiosity. This is a movie about the teenage boys living across the street, who pine for, lust after, and attempt to understand the girls, with that intensity unique to teenagers. Still, the movie suffers from a lack of strong individual characterization of either the girls or the boys who want them. Nonetheless, The Virgin Suicides captures the life-or-death ferocity of adolescent emotion. It would take Coppola’s next film for the writer/director to learn how to fill her characters’ inner lives.
Up Next:
5/14 - Lost in Translation (2003) - *Sofia Coppola's 44th Birthday!* Coppola's second film nabbed her a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for this bittersweet story of two Americans drifting through Japan. (Amazon Instant Watch)
5/21 - Marie Antoinette (2006) - Coppola courted her first bit of controversy for this anachronistic, pop-fuelled biopic, again starring Kirsten Dunst as the infamous monarch. (Amazon Instant Watch)
5/28 - Somewhere (2010) - Sofia Coppola turns inward for inspiration with a movie about a famous actor and his daughter living at the Chateau Marmont. (Amazon Instant Watch) (Netflix)