Review
Lolita). Josh Hartnett also has a lot of fun as
Trip Fontaine, the only boy who manages to
make that all important physical connection
with any of the girls. His performance is a lift
in what could have been an overly serious
picture, a perfect storm of cool and
confusion.
Coppola's screenplay is also a masterwork in
storytelling economy, allowing the visuals to
do most of the talking. A sequence in which a
priest visits the house and tries to speak with
the mother, is particularly haunting. Clearly
coming at the material with a music video
style (not a bad match to such a story), the
deaths of the Lisbon girls are, rightly,
ambiguous. Just why they did what they did
to themselves can only be speculated on. Its a
mystery as intoxicating as the girls
themselves, and one the boys will never be
able to fathom.
Coppola's film is a dream, a rose tinted
melodrama that says as much about the pain
of adolescence than any other American
picture produced in the last 20 years. It also
stays frighteningly relevant, the
"imprisonment of being a girl" as the story
calls it, a harbinger of where teenage life in
America sits today. Given 30 more years, Lux
would probably be picking up a handgun.
Like so many film makers who emerged in the
90's, such as Danny Boyle or Spike Jonze,
Coppola's debut remains her finest
achievement, a statement of intent, of an
original style and talent. And most of all of a
director who is interested in making us feel
something real. Be that life, death or the
unfathomable.
"We began the impossible process of trying to
forget them."
Never was a quote more appropriate to
describe the film itself.