The Virgin Suicides (1999)
A review of Sofia Coppola’s portrait of 1970s girlhood: The Virgin Suicides.
The first time I read The Virgin Suicides was in the eighth grade, when we had to pick books to do book reports on. I chose two books that year: The Virgin Suicides and The Great Gatsby. I found the novel version, from what I can actually remember, of The Virgin Suicides to be quite boring even; as a twelve/thirteen year old reading it, I just wasn’t that interested.
It’s not, as I get older, that I find myself returning to this narrative. I myself am writing about girlhood and femininity these days, and this novel is a case study of that. Then, as a massive Sofia Coppola buff, when I found out that she had done this rendition, it was always on my to-watch list. But I never actually got around to watching it, until now at least.
This movie is an interesting case study, although also being extremely Coppola-esque. Let’s dive straight into this review.
Content
The movie starts out with the youngest sister, Cecilia, attempting to commit suicide. She is only about thirteen years old. In an attempt to cheer her up and hopefully lift her out of her depression, her parents throw a party for the family, inviting all of the local neighborhood boys. Cecilia says she is tired and heads upstairs, and then we’ve uncovered to a horrifying truth moments later: she has jumped out of her bedroom window in another suicide attempt. She has succeeded in killing herself, as she has impaled herself on a fence.
Our main characters are the girls of the Lisbon family, Cecilia’s other four sisters. We mainly follow around Lux, the promiscuous bad-girl of the family, and her little adventures of adolescent rebellion. The Lisbon family is heavily religious; the girls are isolated after Cecilia’s death, they dress modestly, and, after Lux breaks curfew once, they are withdrawn from school and she is forced to burn and trash her rock records.
The backdrop for the film is perfect—it’s Detroit in the 1970s, as the city slowly began to decay due to the automobile industry within it dying. There’s several scenes in which all of the local trees are tagged, as the local government wants to tear all of them down. Like the Lisbon family, even the trees are infected with a mysterious disease, creating situations in which literally everything is dying around our main characters. The trees are cut down, the daughter is dead, and then, when you turn on the television, there’s just stories about student suicides. One girl, as the monitor flickers, tearfully describes how she baked rat poison into a cake to try and kill herself—but then her grandmother eats it instead.
My biggest qualm with this and the book is that it is completely narrated by the boys who loved the girls. Automatically, we are set up in a narrative in which men are controlling the information which is passed through, which complicates this entire notion of this being a tale of girlhood. I think Coppola does a good way of filtering that out, through her use of coloring, costuming, and her choice of shots, but then we have to take a step back and look at who really is telling the story. What if it was one of the girls narrating from a diary? Why do we strip away their voices in such a manner? Coppola does this more with coloring (e.g. when Tripp ditches Lux, the world seems completely blue—refer to image below), but this is just a qualm I have with the narrative overall.
This also feeds on the concept of America’s obsession with dead girls. When the girls die, the boys become even more obsessed with the girls, like many Americans. It’s a case study in our culture, although a horrific one.
Cinematic Technique
I don’t know what to say about her cinematic technique besides the fact that it just screams Sofia Coppola. Coppola deals with a lot of shit as a woman making in film, although there is something definitely to say about her privilege (being the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola) and being a white woman. We see her signatures throughout: the pastel colorings, the soft tones and clothes, the eye for aesthetics. As seen in Marie Antoinette, she often inserts rock music into the narrative somehow. Here, in this film, we see this in Lux’s records: she is forced to burn rock records.
One of the most well-known scenes, one that stuck out to me, was the scene in which we see the girls in the faded background smiling and playing with sparklers. Lux, who is demonized for her pursuits outside of the conservative family she is trapped within, smiles sweetly and innocently, holding a sparkler right in front of her face.
Overall Thoughts
I don’t think I’d watch this film again, honestly. I watched it once and that was good enough. As much as I love Sofia Coppola and what she’s done for the industry, it’s films like these that get to be too repetitive. She often picks stories about privileged white girls, and while clearly there were issues in this family, it just seems like a rehash of the same topics but in different eras of history. I would’ve liked to see this film from the girl’s stories, about struggles of mental health and growing up like this, rather than just have the boys narrate. This was released in 1999, which explains why that may of not happened in a more mainstream release, but it’s something I wish from this film.
