The
Virgin Suicides
Rated
R
Opens
Friday, May 5
In 1989, Sofia
Coppola co-wrote and designed costumes for Life With
Zoe, a segment of the film New York Stories that
was directed by her father, Francis Ford Coppola.
In real life, memories do not follow the pattern of a regular
movie. Recollections are not played out in fully developed
narrative timeframes, perfectly balanced structured strands
of thought or tangible, easily understood events. Memories
can be visited but never wholly embraced. They can be strong
and unforgettable, but bit by bit, they lose their edges.
The more they elude us, the less simplistic they become--never
just happy or sad, but mysterious and bittersweet, replete
with or bereft of emotion for reasons just beyond comprehension.
The Virgin Suicides, director Sofia Coppola's feature
debut, captures the ambiguity of lost thought almost perfectly.
Adapted from the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, Coppola's film
doesn't tell a story; instead, it leaves a swoony, foggy
impression, a darkly beautiful intangibility filled with
almost torturously elusive feeling. Set in Michigan in the
early '70s, the film is marked immediately with the pall
of death and the dangling unknown of why it happened. The
five teenage Lisbon sisters--all blonde and beautiful--kill
themselves, and a group of smitten teenage boys struggles
to understand why. The suicides are a defining period in
these boys' lives, but even as they narrate the film (in
the collective voice of Giovanni Ribisi), they have never
gotten their hands around the loss. In an unusual narrative
and cinematic point of view, the boys wistfully re-create
the girls' lives through a swiped diary, bits of bric-a-brac
memorabilia and remembrances of voyeurism, idealism and
fleeting carnality. After the death of 13-year-old Cecilia
(Hanna Hall), the remaining sisters Lux (Kirsten Dunst),
Bonnie (Chelse Swain), Mary (A.J. Cook) and Therese (Leslie
Hayman) go into a mourning period marked not by obvious
wailing drama, but by a peculiar inwardness that only sisters
can understand. When a psychiatrist tells the grieving parents
(Kathleen Turner and a touching, understated James Woods)
that the girls need more social contact, they allow the
foxy Lux (with sisters and their assigned dates in tow)
to attend a homecoming dance with heartthrob Trip Fontaine
(Josh Hartnett). After an innocent, oddly heartbreaking
transgression occurs, the strict Roman Catholic family (led
mostly by Mom) cloisters the girls in the house, taking
them out of school and depriving them of all social contact.
Of course, this can't come without consequences.
But Coppola doesn't place those consequences within a moral
straitjacket--no one is demonized, and no one understood.
Some will criticize the film for its lack of fully developed
characters, but the point here is to capture an adolescence
lost, both to the sisters and to the boys themselves. The
Virgin Suicides is shot with a gauzy, haloed beauty
that is obsessive but never perverse. Coppola's intelligence,
sensitivity and unique film style avoid obvious irony and
easy interpretation. Her vision of this uptight suburbia
is made erotic and exotic by the fairy-tale Rapunzels who
live there--troubled, creative and interesting girls trapped
in the unfathomable and misty glaze of memories.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Willamette Week | originally
published April 26,
2000
|
