The Virgin Suicides (1999)
reviewed by Chris Watt
There is something other worldly and
haunting at the heart of Sofia Coppola's
debut feature, an adaptation of Jeffrey
Eugenides' novel THE VIRGIN SUICIDES.
Certainly the title foresees the doom laden
finale to the picture and, yet, seen from a
thoroughly male perspective (the film being
the recollection of one of the boys who once
loved the ethereal Lisbon Sisters) there is an
ambiguity and playfulness to the structure
which recalls more of a fever dream, or a hazy
distant memory, than a gospel truth of the
series of events that unfold.
Coppola herself comes from a family of
independently minded artists. And it is with
that independent sensibility that she shoots
her picture, marrying the hazy, summer lawn
aesthetic of 1970's Michigan, as lensed by
Edward Lachman, with the bubblegum
daydream of a million hormone addled
teenagers, also perfectly encapsulated within
the smooth score by French pop duo Air.
Through recollections, pieced together by the
neighbourhood boys over the intervening
years, we are witness to the demise of the
Lisbon girls, starting with the unsuccessful
attempt by the youngest, Cecilia, which sends
the overprotective parents (played to
perfection by Kathleen Turner and James
Woods) into panic.
Yet our focus is compelled towards one
daughter, Lux, in particular.
Played by Kirsten Dunst, Lux, for all her
recklessness, is the only one of the Lisbons to
actually experience the more sensual aspects
of her puberty, her apparent sexual appetites
both a rebellious finger flip to her mother and
the ultimate cry for rescue.Luxis our 'in' to
life within that dark, repressed household.
Dunst is wonderful here, an actor who has
always tread that delicate line between
playfulness and sexuality, her beauty
balanced between a state of womanhood and
nymphet (she would have played a killer