I don't think I have heard a more blunt title in ages but for the most blunt summary of a film's content, you can't do better than "The Virgin Suicides." This is Sofia Coppola's brilliant debut film, a searing, intelligent drama of innocence destroyed by the overprotective ruling hand of parents.
The film opens with the title filling the screen from every corner, as if it was scribbled by overzealous teenage girls. Then the film gradually reveals one particular family, the Lisbons, five luscious-looking Catholic girls living in Michigan during the 1970's. The overprotective parents include the nerdy-looking father, a math teacher (James Woods), and the domineering, stuffy mother (a largely unrecognizable Kathleen Turner). Kirsten Dunst (in perhaps the best role of her career) plays the main Lisbon girl, Lux, whom every adolescent male pines for, including those who live in the neighborhood. These girls seem perfect but everything is on the surface - they are like Barbie Dolls with masks to hide the real problems. At the beginning of the film, a thirteen-year-old Lisbon girl (Hanna Hall) fails a suicide attempt, and then successfully makes another attempt. Nobody knows why, and the parents seem unaffected, as if it was a temporary setback. The father keeps thinking he s! ! ees his dead daughter, and so do the other girls. But the question is: why did she kill herself? Could it happen to the others?
The main focus in "The Virgin Suicides" is Lux, and she is pursued by Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett), a cool dude, for no better description, who is pined for by all the girls for his smoothness and seductive quality - he is a like a young Don Juan. Lux avoids him but his charm eventually gets to her, to the point where she is asked to the prom as are all her sisters (they all end up wearing the same dress). Coppola also makes good use of songs by ELO and others to accentuate the mood, and the prom scenes are especially good at evoking a constrained innocence that is likely to be broken any time soon.
The prom is the central climax of the film where everything goes downhill. The mother gets so fed up with Lux's disappearance after the prom that she keeps everyone locked up in the house, confined by Lux's unconstrained behavior. Week after week, the girls are kept inside, restricted from ever leaving the house except to pick up the mail. The father seems to go slightly insane, resorting to talking to the plants at school. The mother throws out all rock n' roll records and anything else that might corrupt the girls' innocence.
"The Virgin Suicides" basically gives away what will happen to the girls - it is even foretold in the film's opening voice-over, narrated by an older Trip played by Michael Pare. There are no easy answers or conventional explanations to their suicides, but we can only surmise by the strange behavioral interaction between the girls and the parents (communication is notably absent). The beauty is that Coppola captures the essence of adolescence, and shows how fragile the Lisbon girls were within their confinement. They were easily corruptible, but were incapable of dealing with emotional pain and duress - instead, they dealt with it through an easy path, an escape, by ending their lives.
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