The Virgin Suicides
dir: Sofia Coppola
R, 96 min.
Playing at Bellevue Cinema 12 and Green Hills Commons 16
Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides is set in a chronologically disjointed, somewhat indistinct version of the mid-1970s—a portrayal that’s a lot more honest and perceptive than it sounds. Pop history tends to boil complex periods of change and conflict down to 10-year bouillon cubes. With distance, each decade is reduced to a workable concept—the ’50s as the time of oppressive conformity, the ’60s as the years of social upheaval—as we rely less on firsthand recollections and more on the filtered perceptions of chroniclers and commentators.
But for most people my age, the 1970s are still just close enough to be fogged by actual memory. The thread of memory is a lot more complex—and a lot more evocative—than a line drawn from Watergate to the Bicentennial to ”God Save the Queen.“ You can draw that line straight as an arrow, be factually correct, and still miss entirely the sense of life then as it is remembered and how it relates to living now. That sense is what The Virgin Suicides gets stunningly right. Coppola’s remarkable first film captures what life was like between the dots on the timeline, and how in retrospect time, place, emotion, music, and memory dissolve into a blur that’s vivid without necessarily being clear.
Adapted by Coppola from a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, the haunting, dreamlike The Virgin Suicides concerns the impact a group of sisters made on the boys living in a Michigan suburb in the mid-1970s, as objects of obsession, fantasy, and ultimately regret. It’s narrated in the present by one of those grown-up boys, though we’re not told which one. But he speaks for his entire circle of buddies when he says, in the movie’s opening moments, that the decline of the neighborhood dates back 25 years—back to the suicides of the Lisbon girls.
The Lisbon girls are five blond, virginal sisters, ages 13 to 17, sequestered in the household of their stifling mom and ineffectual math-teacher dad (Kathleen Turner and James Woods, both playing brilliantly against type). The girls, including Bonnie (Chelse Swain), Mary (A.J. Cook), and Therese (Leslie Hayman), are virtual shut-ins until the youngest daughter, Cecilia (Hanna R. Hall), attempts suicide by slashing her wrists. At that point, a psychologist (a fine cameo by Danny DeVito) advises the parents that some contact with the outside world might be a good thing.
That gives the boys across the street even more tantalizing glimpses of the girls. It also paves the way for the smooth-talking jock Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett) to get closer to the most desirable of the sisters, the aptly named Lux (played by Kirsten Dunst in an unaffectedly radiant performance). To finagle some time alone with Lux, Trip arranges dates for all the Lisbon girls for the school homecoming dance—an occasion whose middle-American surrealism is only enhanced by ELO’s ”Strange Magic.“ But in the dance’s aftermath, the Lisbon home becomes even more oppressive than before. The girls are withdrawn from school; their isolation becomes a sentence.
It’s practically a given that in comedies about teen sex—which The Virgin Suicides is, in mordant and unsettling ways—the point of view will be male. (So will the writers and director.) From Porky’s to American Pie, the tradition is that guys will do the bagging and bragging, while the girls will be interchangeable stroke-mag conquests. The Virgin Suicides subverts this formula, in part because Coppola manages to depict Lux’s sexual curiosity through the eyes of others without exploiting her. Compare Coppola’s sensitive, empathetic treatment of Lux with the handling of the young actresses in American Beauty, who are stripped for the audience’s delectation even as the movie chides eroticizing teenage girls. The Lisbon girls are indeed the lust objects of the local boys, even though the guys don’t fully comprehend lust or how to act upon it. Their spying on the girls through a telescope only underscores how remote the idea of sexual contact really is.
But our knowledge of the Lisbon girls is limited by the blurring of adolescent fantasy and adult perception in the narrator’s remembrances. Because he never overheard a single meaningful conversation among the sisters, they’re as much a mystery to us as to him. In his imagining of their lives, the girls are arranged in their bedroom in a still-life of splayed blond hair and moist heat, saying nothing. Their status as lust objects will keep the boys from ever knowing them as anything else—one of the reasons their memory remains haunting after 25 years.
The specific year is kept deliberately (and shrewdly) vague by writer-director Coppola, although if we date the time back from now, the year is 1975. (As a friend pointed out, that’s the year that brought Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, another enigmatic movie about teenage girls in which crossing the sexual threshold is a mystical, irrevocable passage.) Since Coppola was born in 1971—the year she played the baby in the classic christening sequence in her father Francis’ The Godfather—she couldn’t have too many memories of the mid-1970s that don’t involve a stroller.
Even so, Coppola conveys a sense of the period, and of life for the Lisbons and their neighbors, that is emotionally and psychologically precise if not strictly chronological—something embodied in the movie’s selection of music. Heart’s ”Magic Man“ may not have come out until 1976, but as the self-provided soundtrack for an aging Lothario’s studly recollections, it’s pretty damn perfect. Styx’s ”Come Sail Away“ wasn’t released until 1977; yet there’s something about its proggy bombast that suits the hazy recollections of the narrator, whose exactitude on other fine points is sketchy.
At the same time, the song, like the rest of the music, works also as an expression of secret longing. For all its silliness, the chorus exhorts an escape from the suburban repression that’s suffocating the Lisbon sisters—an escape that sounds close at hand on the record player but is fatally unreachable for the girls in real life.
The French duo Air’s velour goldmine of a score doesn’t copy any one single genre of ’70s music; it evokes an indistinct haze of Roxy Music glam, Dark Side of the Moon acid rock, extended-jam AOR, and bubblegummy pop. It’s as if a radio station were playing the mood these songs created rather than the songs themselves. The Virgin Suicides evokes the mid-’70s in more obvious ways, ranging from the plywood paneling in the Lisbons’ home to the shots of Lux superimposed over sunny skies—images recalling the cheerleader movies that were drive-in staples at the time. (Here, as throughout, Edward Lachman’s cinematography is invaluable.)
At no time, though, does the movie take the easy way out by pinning the Lisbons’ fates on a safely distant past. The recent ’70s period piece The Ice Storm planted lots of evidence to indict the era of The Joy of Sex and key parties; its only purpose seemed to be to make contemporary viewers feel superior about their own timid hang-ups. The eerie conclusion of The Virgin Suicides leaves us wondering, like the mystified boys, whether the Lisbon girls decided a future of either emotionless repression or loveless sex was actually no future at all. That, sadly, is timeless.
