Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides is a moving, dryly funny account of adolescent fascination and the harm it can overlook. Its dreaminess sometimes keeps the sisters too distant, but the performances make that distance painful.
The Virgin Suicides is moving, funny in uncomfortable places and worth seeing, though its distance from the Lisbon sisters can frustrate. Sofia Coppola adapts Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel through the memories of boys who are fascinated by the girls. Their attention seems flattering until we start to notice how much it misses. Giovanni Ribisi’s narration keeps us close to the boys’ attempts to explain what they remember.
Kirsten Dunst, as Lux, gives the boys’ fascination a credible focus without making their idea of her feel complete. There is humour in her assurance, and an unpredictability that stops the character becoming merely the object of somebody else’s longing. We were moved by the unease Dunst keeps beneath Lux’s confidence; being admired seems to offer her so little comfort. Coppola trusts the performance enough to leave some of that discomfort unexplained.
James Woods and Kathleen Turner give Mr and Mrs Lisbon enough ordinary parental weight to make the household’s repression troubling. Woods brings a warmth that seems unequal to the job of fatherhood; Turner makes the mother’s authority hard to shrug off. The performances let us recognise these parents without excusing them, and leave room for humour without turning them into comic monsters. Josh Hartnett’s Trip Fontaine belongs to the same convincingly adolescent world as Dunst’s Lux. The young performers keep attraction awkward enough to resist the polish of the surrounding images.
Edward Lachman’s cinematography makes the suburb look softened by the boys’ memory, encouraging us to share their pleasure in remembering it. Jasna Stefanovic’s production design gives the 1970s neighbourhood a settled, familiar appearance, a plausible place for adults to assume nothing is wrong. The family’s unhappiness does not require a visibly sinister setting to become believable. That ordinariness matters: it keeps the repression close to recognisable family life, even when the images grow dreamy.
Editors Melissa Kent and James Lyons allow the telling to drift through recollection and fantasy, giving us something to follow when the slight plot offers little forward movement. That rhythm suits the boys’ inability to leave the sisters alone in memory, although some passages add little to our sense of the girls. The music by Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel sustains the dreaminess without making the sadness feel insistent. Its restraint leaves room for the dry humour, which matters in a story that could easily become oppressively solemn.
The limitation is that Lux becomes much easier to recognise as a person than her sisters. We can accept that the boys do not understand them and still wish Coppola had given the other girls more room. At times, her fascination with their mystery risks repeating the boys’ mistake, leaving us to admire people whose thoughts we cannot reach. A few more distinctions between the sisters would have made their unhappiness more affecting.
Teenage dramas often supply adults whose failings explain everything and young people who can state exactly what hurts. Coppola is more convincing about how much goes unspoken, even when her restraint becomes frustrating. This is a film to watch when there is time to sit quietly afterwards, rather than when you need a story to settle its questions before the lights come up.
