Bathed in golden light and thick summer air, The Virgin Suicides is a poignant adaptation and an achingly beautiful watch.
Just like the height of summer that it’s set against, The Virgin Suicides is a languid, stifling picture of youth. When the season is in full effect, and sofa-rotting feels like the only relief, there is no better time to watch Sofia Coppola’s twisted portrait of female adolescence and middle-American suburbia.
The sweet heat of the season complements the darkness of the Lisbons’ story, one so intertwined with the (supposed) lightness of youth. More nuanced than the obvious pathetic fallacy of cold, stormy nights when it comes to themes of suicide and inner turmoil, the stuffy, debilitating heat of a Michigan summer in the ’70s is where it all unfolds. Following five troubled sisters and the boys who love them, the film centres on the girls’ tragic end and the mythology that keeps their memory alive long after that fateful year. Eccentric and unreachable, isolated by strict religious parents, the girls are obsessively theorised and catalogued by the boys next door, leading to a fond and melancholic story that tries to make sense of their suicides.
Ultimately, The Virgin Suicides story is about trauma; it is about men with “thinning hair and soft bellies” coming to terms with loss and love that hit them at such a young age. The story’s narrators are neighbourhood boys who never quite outgrew their fascination, haunted by the peculiar ache of adolescence, wanting desperately to understand something that remains forever out of reach. But under Coppola’s direction, this story shifts, adapting the source material to accommodate a more female-oriented narrative. Under her lens, these girls go from idealised fledgling beauties to real girls, seen in a fuller, more abject complexity.
Foregrounded by this stuffy heat that also brings misery – death of beloved trees, swarming insects and a lingering smell – the plight of five sisters is pictured with Sofia Coppola’s soft and charmingly naive style. This feature marked her directorial debut, and with her father as producer and the beautiful talent of Kirsten Dunst front and centre, it launched her aesthetic sensibilities into the cultural landscape. As is often the case, this debut epitomised what her style and taste would become, combining soft romanticism with an unmistakably feminine perspective that later peaked in films like Marie Antoinette and Priscilla.
Her fixations on girlhood and on fascinating, immortalised young women make this adaptation everything it is. While maintaining Eugenides’ air of mystery, the girls are explored further, down to their abject qualities; their dirty bedrooms, their tampons, the violent visible details of their deaths. Like feminist theorist Anna Backman Rogers writes, this visual language that Coppola develops is a critique of ‘the implicit violence and control that is wrought upon the adolescent female body.’ Their deaths and their pubescent bodies, depicted, threaten to decentre the masculine subjectivities enforced on them.
Therese, Mary, Lux, Bonnie and Cecilia are made startlingly human, no longer mere objects of adolescent fascination, seen through male eyes. Moving from page to screen, Coppola invites us to observe the girls beyond the confines of the narrators’ memories. Portraits of girly ephemera, and even the swirling, heart-dotted handwriting of the main title, portray an intimate image of girlhood. Attention to these small, distinctly feminine details allows the sisters to exist as vivid individuals rather than simply as the subjects of memory and desire. The elusive reason for their deaths endures, but their personalities and humanity are made more relatable, more graspable, especially to a female audience.
Stellar performances make The Virgin Suicides even more immersive. Kirsten Dunst, AJ Cook, Leslie Hayman, Hanna Hall and Chelse Swain are each beautiful in their own ways, animating the Lisbon sisters with their own idiosyncratic glares and smirks. James Woods and Kathleen Turner are cast against type as the strict, quiet, and tragic Lisbon parents, which adds to the off-kilter quality of their characters. Nearly 30 years after its release, it feels like the film has preserved its cast just as it preserves the sisters.
Much of the film’s enduring appeal lies in its atmosphere. Edward Lachman’s cinematography and Air’s iconic, dream-like score wrap the Lisbon sisters in the same veil of nostalgia that clouds the boys’ recollections. Through Coppola’s defining style and these collaborations, the film takes on a halcyon quality, its sun-drenched suburbia at once comforting and claustrophobic.
Bathed in golden light and thick summer air, The Virgin Suicides is a poignant adaptation and an achingly beautiful watch. In a season so often depicted as carefree and euphoric, Coppola’s film finds something refreshing in summer’s antithetical darkness, blending joy and tragedy in one unforgettable picture.
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