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The Virgin Suicides (2000)

Starring: Kirsten Dunst, A.J. Cook, Hanna R. Hall, Chelse Swain, Leslie Hayman, Josh Hartnett, Hayden Christensen, Robert Schwartzman, Lee Kagan, Kathleen Turner, James Woods, Jonathan Tucker, Joe Dinicol, Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Pare, Scott Glenn, and Danny DeVito

Screenplay by Sofia Coppola

Directed by Sofia Coppola

Cinematography by Edward Lachman

I do not own any of the photos posted.

SPOILERS AHEAD

This film is not about who the Lisbon girls were. The film was about the perspective in which the teenage boys saw them.

Sofia Coppola’s directorial debut The Virgin Suicides is a dreamy and whimsical perspective of teenage and religious escapism. The Virgin Suicides is narrated by an adult who speaks for the boys in a Michigan suburban neighborhood 25 years after the suicides of the Lisbon girls–Therese, Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Cecelia. These boys, who remain anonymous throughout the film, are mesmerized by the Lisbon girls.

Cecelia, the youngest of the girls, is the first to go. After attempting suicide by slitting her wrists in the bathtub and later succeeding by jumping from her second-story window onto a fence below, the Lisbon girls, as their parents notice, slowly began to fade.

Lux is perhaps the most dazzling of the sisters, and also the most rebellious. When school begins, she begins a secret romance with school heartthrob Trip Fontaine, who negotiates with the strict Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon in order to take Lux and her sisters to the school homecoming dance. After Lux and Trip win homecoming king and queen, Trip convinces Lux to take a walk with him on the football field, where she ultimately ends up losing her virginity. Trip abandons Lux in her sleep thereafter, and they never speak again. She wakes up alone, in the middle of the school’s football field, breaking curfew. Trip, the adult narrator states, “I liked her a lot. But out there on the football field, it was different.” Trip ultimately decided to leave because the sex was not what he had imagined for both him and Lux. She wakes up the next morning to take a taxi home.

After this, the girls are confined to the walls of their bedrooms by their parents. The boys watch them through a telescope, and communicate with them through morse code and later a telephone. There are many beautiful shots of the girls lying in their rooms, reading, talking, and communicating with the neighborhood boys. This is when the girls are no longer themselves, but instead what the boys view them as. These scenes are beautiful because the boys see their beauty, more than anything else.

TW: suicide

The boys later visit the house as directed by the girls through a letter, and speak to Lux. They are invited inside under the presumption that they are to help the girls’ escape and begin to start exploring out of curiosity. They stumble across Bonnie’s hanging body in the basement and begin to flee. The boys then encounter a dead Mary in the kitchen and realized that the girls had made a suicide pact. The girls’ death symbolized who they were. Bonnie had hanged herself, Mary had stuck her head in the gas oven, Therese had overdosed on sleeping pills, and Lux had died of carbon monoxide poisoning by sealing the garage shut and leaving the engine running. They each died in different ways, and by different attempts, but in the end, they all ended up in the same place. It shows that each of the girls was different, but ultimately, were viewed as the same by those who they encountered.

I think this film is remembered for its beauty rather than the actual story. The girls’ mother is a hysteric Catholic terrified of her daughters’ budding sexuality that she adds cloth to their homecoming dresses until they appear as “four identical sacks.” Their father has good means when it comes to the girls, but is ultimately useless for the girls’ wellbeing. However, I do not believe this is what drove the girls to their death.

The boys never truly saw the girls for who they were. They never saw their pain and emotional torment from their isolated home life. The boys saw the Lisbon girls as unflawed and perfect creatures, which is what they’re depicted as in the film.

Sofia Coppola is content with the means of mystery when it comes to her films. Because we have an unreliable narrator that tells the story of the Lisbon girls, we can never truly know why they committed suicide. The lack of explanation is the whole point of the story: the girls were never truly known for who they were, but instead what they were ultimately viewed as; perfection.

The film is beautiful over everything else because the boys saw nothing but the Lisbon girls’ beauty. Even in Cecelia’s death and the remaining girls’ suicides, it was beautiful because that’s what the story truly is. The story is tedious and captivating, but not entirely real, just like the girl’s lives.

This is not to say that the girls’ aren’t real nonetheless, they are instead a form of idealism that encaptured the boys around them. That’s why I believe the film is beautiful and encapsulating, not only because that’s what the Lisbon girls’ were viewed as, but even in death, that’s what they were.

Overall rating: 8/10