The Virgin Suicides
Sofia Coppola, USA, 1999, 96 mins
Review by Gerald Houghton (2000)
So, two surprises see us off. One, that despite what's been said, this particular Coppola scion's feature debut is remarkably faithful to its source in both narrative and tone. And, two, it's funny. Not a comedy, but in ways the subject matter might not initially suggest. Teen suicide. By the turn of 90 or so minutes, five American beauties - thirteen to seventeen - will be dead by their own hand. They are the Lisbon girls, all sisters, all ruled as much by some self-imposed internal code as by the iron hand of their strict parents.
Jeffery Eugenides' 1993 novel is told in the collective voice. And not the girls'. It's the boys, those neighbouring bundles of nervous energy and pulsating hormones, who mediate the narrative. Their understanding of the central tragedy is through observation and collective imagination. They've assembled a reliquary of the purloined and assumed; stolen icons and presumed detail. But their dilemma is shared with us: the film retains the essential unfathomability of Eugenides' book. It's a palimpsest of cause and effect.
In that way, The Virgin Suicides is both allowed privileged access to the Lisbon home and yet retains its intrinsic mystery. We no more understand the suicides than the suggested religious authority that boils in the parents. Coppola's film is always subject to the subjective domestic narrative, and, for all we know, is equally derived from wider myth-making. The story of the Lisbon girls is, finally, only that they died.
Coppola's achievement, though, is less in word than imagination. The film, like the book, operates under a drowsy atmosphere, as though it were somehow shot underwater. It both exists in a specific time and frame (seventies Michigan) and outside of space-time. Everything, for us, is moving towards death, but the suggestion is that, for the boys, time was suspended once the bodies were found.
In a film like this you really are robbed of speaking about performances. Kathleen Turner's mother is recognisable, but James Woods as the girls' father has been subsumed by the hair and the spectacles and, one suspects, the ultimate spectacle of his angelic daughters. Everyone moves through the narrative - floats through it - but they are always at its service. It is neither character nor plot driven. And the one thing you always want to know is the one thing no one ever will - why they do it. All we are allowed is that it is inevitable that they will.
Music is integral, both from the wonderfully ethereal dark, comic, Gallic synth-Pop of French duo Air, to the narrative-bolstering found songs that litter the soundtrack: Styx, Carole King and especially Todd Rundgren. (Once Mrs Lisbon puts the house in lockdown, the boys can only communicate with the inside by swapping songs over the phone.)
The Virgin Suicides is all pretty girls and pretty boys and pretty pop music and pretty teen sex, but is never nostalgic nor wistful. It's an archaeology, an exploration, not explanation. It's more David Lynch than it is The Wonder Years. And as a probing of the US suburban mentality, is a far braver, more acute and less noticed undertaking than the much garlanded American Beauty. But then wasn’t it always thus?