The Virgin Suicides (1999)

Directed by: Sofia Coppola | 97 minutes | drama | Actors: James Woods, Kathleen Turner, Kirsten Dunst, Josh Hartnett, Michael Paré, Scott Glenn, Danny DeVito, AJ Cook, Hanna R. Hall, Leslie Hayman, Chelse Swain

Female artists whose work is judged on their own grounds are rare; in the recent past they were soon called feminist, as if they only create in order to emancipate. The poet Sylvia Plath is a tragic example of how a great artist can be put under the control of someone else’s (sic) cart because of the period in which she worked, putting the quality of her work in the shadows in its own right.

Sofia Coppola has her time with her and let’s hope she is spared the foregoing. She is not yet a celebrity, but her work has a feminine individuality that is rock solid. Coppola acts as a modest observer who prefers to speak with images than with words. In a character study such as Lost in Translation (2003), the result was too much of a dramatic non-commitment, but in The Virgin Suicides her debut it succeeds. In this film, the mystery surrounding five sisters who collectively commit suicide is left intact and even magnified by Coppola’s dreamy visual style. Coppola perfectly captures the stormy stage of life the Lisbon sisters find themselves in; she makes palpable the curious mixture of despair and expectation in which the girls find themselves.

Eye of the storm and focal point in The Virgin Suicides is Lux Lisbon, the prettiest and the most provocative of the bunch paying tribute to Kirsten Dunst. Her burgeoning sexuality has centrifugal forces; the stability of the family is endangered and the outside world that threatens father and mother can no longer be kept at a distance.

Good folk, lock up your daughters, it is called in the title tune of the series Blackadder’ (1983) and so it happens in The Virgin Suicides, with ultimately disastrous consequences. Coppola observes and makes it happen; just like in Lost in Translation, the psychological state of the main characters remains guesswork, but in this film that’s not a bad thing; the images, for example, of Lux lying on a sports field speak for themselves. Coppola does not interpret events, she gives a vision in images. She is waiting for her first major film, one with compelling dramatic twists. Looking at her characters, she can intervene in their lives as the best.