Dir: Sofia Coppola, US, 1999, 97 mins
Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Josh Hartnett, James Wood, Kathleen Turner
Review by Craig Driver
Doctor: You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets
Cecilia: Obviously Doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen-year old girl.
The wistful sophomore effort from Francis’ little girl wafted in an elegant new era of film. Exotic, hazy and endlessly romantic The Virgin Suicides, based on Jeffrey Euginedes’ novel, crafted a soft and delicate method of cinematography with a sweetly acidic narrative.
Adolescent boys were transfixed by the mystery of girls; their sexuality, their lightness of being, their secret lingo, and their fluid movement. Coppola’s flock of serpentine nymph’s are almost ungraspable – all smoke and mirrors. The most exotic family on the street is the Lisbon’s. The father (James Woods) teaches math at the high school and his wife (Kathleen Turner) is a strict disciplinarian with five daughters. When the youngest daughter Cecilia commits suicide their neighbours, four boys, are shocked and unable to handle the situation. They find her diary and concoct their own stories about Cecilia’s life. They subsequently become entranced with the sexual “stone fox” Lux (Dunst) who in turns becomes involved with high-school heartthrob Trip Fontaine (Hartnett).
Laced with soft-tempered repression and restraint, Coppola’s debut is a vapour trail of angst. After convincing her father that the Lisbon sisters should be allowed to attend the prom, Lux bends the rules and spends the entire night with Fontaine. This indulgence in freedom causes the girls’ mother to punish them, all the girls becoming virtual prisoners in their home. The boys explore creative ways of communicating with them; the best being a dialogue over the phone using love ballads by Carole King and The Bee Gees. In the end, the Lisbon girls find a startling way of imprinting themselves upon the psyches and souls of the boys across the street. Flattening out the colour and mixing faded greys and pinks with washed out browns, Coppola weaves a sumptuous tapestry. Tragic, mournful and darkly comic Euginedes’ yearning prose is treated with great respect and swallow-like skill.
Coppola understands that the flip side of adolescence angst is a glacial haze somewhere between innocence and sin. The Virgin Suicides accentuates the pastel colours and dreamy silks of Edward Lachman’s photography and reinforces Air’s aching, haunting soundtrack. Combining the prosaic beauty of William Eggleston’s photography with the modern tint of a suburban tragedy The Virgin Suicides is an oddly compelling piece. Echoing elements of Van Sant’s Elephant and Lynch’s Twin Peaks cult series Coppola entwines her father’s steely eye for detail with her own unique sense of translucent yearning.
The Virgin Suicides manages to be both bold and beautiful. Taking simplistic framing and tone it gently works the fate of these five sisters into a female orientated fable of pristine beauty. Coppola, like Donnie Darko’s Richard Kelly and Michel Gondry, understands that cinema is not simply a medium in which narrative is king. The Virgin Suicides disproves such a theory and grants grace and beauty in the form of Coppola and her fragrant aesthetic. Cinema is an artistic form in which great visual power resides. For Coppola film is an art and as such the screen is her fabric of choice.
