Other Titles • The Virgin Suicides (1999) • The Lisbon Sisters (2000) • Sofia Coppola's the Virgin Suicides (2000)
Synopses for The Virgin Suicides (1999)
1.
Based on the 1993 novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES tells the dreamlike tale of the Lisbons, a family living in a sheltered 1970s suburbia. When Cecilia (Hannah Hall), the youngest of the five teenage Lisbon daughters, inexplicably commits suicide, the rest of the family--Mr. Lisbon (James Woods), an awkward high school math teacher; Mrs. Lisbon (Kathleen Turner), a stern, humorless housewife; and the four remaining sisters: Lux (Kirsten Dunst), Bonnie (Chelse Swain), Mary (A.J. Cook), and Therese (Leslie Hayman)--recedes into a morbid cloud of repression and denial. As the girls are forced to retreat from everyday life by their conservative mother, they become the subject of fascination for a group of neighborhood boys, who narrate the story and hope to rescue the girls from their listless confinement.
The first feature by director-screenwriter Sofia Coppola (Francis Ford Coppola's daughter), THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is a mesmerizingly atmospheric film that perfectly captures both the moody tone of the book and the light-saturated feel of the 1970s. Dunst gives a standout performance as the promiscuous Lux, who becomes the sole obsession of high school ladies' man Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett). The movie also includes cameos by Danny DeVito and Scott Glenn. In addition to songs by Heart and Todd Rundgren, the film features an evocative score by the French duo Air.
(41 votes)
2.
Sophia Coppola's alternately dreamy and unsettling film about five suburban sisters who all mysteriously kill themselves (the voice-over tells you as much in the first five minutes) casts a witchy spell that lingers like drugstore perfume on a hot day. Beautifully adapted from Jeffrey Eugenides' icily perfect novel (perhaps the best, if not only, work of fiction narrated exclusively in the first-person plural), the 1970s-set film is constructed as the collective memory of the neighbourhood boys who worshipped the beautiful Lisbon girls, blonde sylph-like teen siblings whose beauty and self-destruction still haunts and perplexes the narrators, now grown men.
Why did they do it? Maybe because their Catholic mother (Kathleen Turner, magnificently clenched) locked them all up when near-youngest daughter Lux (the exquisite Kirsten Dunst) stayed out all night after the prom. Maybe it was due to a kind of pubertal feminine hysteria, set off by the first suicide of the youngest daughter Cecilia. Maybe they were infected by a more general malaise (the film fairly teams with images of dying elm trees, infested lakes and fetid nastiness). Or maybe they will just never know what it's like, in the words of Cecilia, to be a 13-year-old girl.
Coppola has a canny eye for 1970s kitsch and the tawdry, touching magic totems of girlhood (tampons, bright bikinis, half-used make-up) and coaxes terrific deadpan performances both from the younger cast and the veterans. (James Woods as the nerdy Lisbon patriarch is as delightfully cast against type as Turner.) For all the languid gloom, there is great wit in the observation of 1970s decor and playful touches abound: airbrushed flashbacks like vintage Timotei commercials; inserts to reveal Lux has the name of her date magic markered on her knickers; teeth and eyes that sparkle unnaturally with post-production tricks. The soundtrack hits just the right wistful ironic note with a mix of period tunes by Todd Rungren, Gilbert O'Sullivan and the like, complemented by the electronica of French pop band Air (whose standalone efforts for the film are also available on a separate CD. A film as unforgettable as first love. --Leslie Felperin
(33 votes)
3.
Previously criticized for her marginal acting skills, Sofia Coppola made her directorial debut with The Virgin Suicides and silenced her detractors. No amount of coaching from her director father (Francis Coppola) or husband (Spike Jonze) could have guaranteed a film this assured, and in adapting Jeffrey Eugenides's novel, Coppola demonstrates the sensitivity and emotional depth that this material demands. Surely the pain of youth and public criticism found its way into her directorial voice; in the story of four sisters who self-destruct under the steady erosion of their youthful ideals, one can clearly sense Coppola's intimate connection to the inner lives of her characters.
Played in a delicate minor key, the film is heartbreaking, mysterious, and soulfully funny, set in a Michigan suburb of the mid-1970s but timeless and universal to anyone who's been a teenager. The four surviving Lisbon sisters lost a sibling to suicide, and as its title suggests, the film will chart their mutual course to oblivion under the vigilance of repressive parents (Kathleen Turner and James Woods, perfectly cast). But The Virgin Suicides is more concerned with life in that precious interlude of adolescence, when the Lisbon girls are worshipped by the neighborhood boys, their notion of perfection epitomized by Lux (Kirsten Dunst) and her storybook love for high-school stud Trip (Josh Hartnett). Unfolding at the cusp of innocence and sexual awakening, and recalled as a memory, The Virgin Suicides is, ultimately, about the preservation of the Lisbon sisters by their own deaths--suspended in time, polished to perfection, and forever untainted by adulthood. --Jeff Shannon
(32 votes)
4.
In 1970's suburbia lived the five beautiful Lisbon sisters, whose doomed fates indelibly marked the neighborhood boys who to this day continue to obsess over them. It is a story of love and repression, fantasy and terror, sex and death, memory and longing. Therese, Mary, Bonnie, Lux and Cecilia were everything desired and unattainable due to their parents' strict household rules. From afar, the boys watched the girls. Then, they witnessed something that would shake their souls: angelic Cecilia plummeting from her bedroom window. In the wake of Cecila's suicide, the Lisbons shut out the world. It seems they will never recover until Trip Fontaine begins to pursue Lux Lisbon. For one brief evening, four boys get as close to the Lisbon sisters as anyone has ever been. But when Lux and Trip get a little too close, events spiral out of control. The Lisbon girls are locked away and taken out of school by Mrs. Lisbon. Lux descends into an outlaw promiscuity. The boys no longer want to just watch the Lisbon girls. Now they want to save them and by extension their own doomed youth and innocence.
(34 votes)
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