Is there anything as mysterious and irrepressible in the eyes of a teenage boy as the heart of a teenage girl? In The Virgin Suicides, the directorial debut of Francis Ford Coppola’s daughter Sofia, this question provides the focus for a darkly meditative coming-of-age tale in which the tragedy comes not from innocence lost, but from innocence enforced.
The film, set in 1975 in the exclusive Michigan community of Grosse Pointe, tells the story of five sisters who took their lives in an apparent suicide pact. It all starts when 13-year-old Cecilia Lisbon, the youngest, tries to kill herself by slitting her wrists in the bathtub. Like her older siblings—Bonnie, Mary, Therese and Lux—she’s beautiful but withdrawn, as inscrutable to her strict God-fearing mother (an unbelievably frumpy Kathleen Turner) and ineffectual math-teacher father (an unbelievably subdued James Woods) as she is to the neighbourhood boys.
Warned by a psychiatrist (Danny DeVito in a cameo) that Cecilia’s attempt is a cry for help, her parents try to cheer her up with a little party in the basement rec room. The neighbourhood boys are invited; they drink fruit punch and make awkward conversation with the sisters. Cecilia, her shameful bandages covered by taped-on bracelets, quietly sneaks upstairs… and this time, she’s successful.
In the weeks that follow, the boys become obsessed with the Lisbon sisters. Reading Cecilia’s diary, they find a window into her life, but not an understanding of her suicide. Meanwhile, Lux is courted by Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett), the coolest guy in school, who brings out both her explosive passion and her rebellious streak. Predictably, her parents react to her rule-breaking behaviour with drastic measures that turn the sisters into housebound prisoners. Their only outside contact is with the boys, who decipher the girls’ Morse code messages from the house across the street and play them songs like Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally)” over the phone. Ultimately, though, this tenuous bond isn’t strong enough to break the pact the sisters have already made, and the boys are left haunted and baffled by it.
These events are essentially flashbacks (narrated by Giovanni Ribisi), the memories of an unnamed narrator still haunted and baffled by the mystery of the Lisbon suicides. There are also some “interview” segments with an adult Trip Fontaine (Michael Pare), who clearly blames himself for Lux’s death. At times, the film is like a disorienting dream. Coppola weaves images of Cecilia’s ghost into early scenes, and there’s plenty of symbolism in the diseased elm in the Lisbon front yard. When the sisters descend a spiral staircase in a lovely procession of identical vestal-virgin homecoming dresses, they look like maiden sacrifices to an ideal of morally upright suburban perfection that has never existed.
(3/4)