The Virgin Suicides

The Virgin Suicides (2000) is Sofia Coppola's first film, adapted from Jeffrey Eugenides's novel. An American suburb in the seventies. The Lisbon family has five daughters. The youngest kills herself and the parents shut the girls in the house. The neighbourhood boys watch from a distance, play records to them down the telephone, collect their diaries. The most important decision is the narrator. The story is told by those boys, in the first person plural, years afterwards. So everything we know about the girls comes from people who never knew them. That is why the film offers no explanation. Why they did it is not stated, no cause is sought, and the ones searching for a cause are the boys. What Coppola is describing is not the girls but the gaze that turns them into a mystery. The image is consistently too soft and too golden. That is the narrator's memory: not as it was, but as it is recalled. The score is by the French group Air and it is half the texture of the film. Kirsten Dunst was seventeen. The same subject runs through everything Coppola has made since: young women enclosed in a space and a camera looking in from outside. It runs 97 minutes. Who should not watch it: suicide is the central subject and the film aestheticises it, which is exactly what it is criticised for. Anyone close to the subject should stay away. Who it is for: independent cinema, atmospheric drama, and Coppola.