The Virgin Suicides by Sofia Coppola: inside teenage melancholia
In the middle of an empty road, an angelic blond teenage girl is swallowing a strawberry-flavoured ice cream before disappearing from the screen. Her name is Lux, she is 14 and lives in a classical suburb house in front of the street with her quite strict Catholic parents and her four charming sisters. Set in the 70s, the quiet descent into hell of the 5 girls—Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese— is seen from the loving gaze of young boys from the neighborhood and told by them 25 years later as grownups. Golden-hair, light dresses, adolescent fantasy, and abyssal lassitude: the adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’s 1993 novel The Virgin Suicides by Sofia Coppola is tinged with a unique pastel melancholia.
Directed by Sofia Coppola, the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is more than a mere teenage movie. Aged 29 when she shot the film, Coppola grew up in a manly environment, which made her cling to “feminine” aesthetics at a young age. In her mid-20s, after dropping out of the California Institute of the Arts, she read The Virgin Suicides and was immediately amazed by Eugenides’ way of understanding the longing and puzzling experience of being an adolescent. She loved how pictured the book was and during her spare hours she slowly began to write a script for it. A couple of years later, making her first feature film she shot The Virgin Suicides with the optic of making a tribute to the emotional journey that she had just experienced, and that older people tend to forget. Keened by the poetic approach of kids' movies of directors such as John Hughes and tired of the often dull and cheap 2000s teenage film, she created one with deep substance and pretty photography. “I was really motivated to make something sensitive and accurate to a teenage girl”, said Sofia Coppola in retrospect.
During a hot summer somewhere in the late 70’s, Lux’s youngest sister, Cecilia cut her wrist before immersing herself in the bathtub, a Virgin Mary prayer card in the hand. After this failed suicide attempt, a psychoanalyst advised the Lisbon family that Cecilia would benefit from having social interaction with “males” of her age. Thus, they organized a small party in the basement of their house, inviting all the young boys of the neighbor including Joe who suffers from Down syndrome. Soon, every teenager began to laugh at Joe, and Cecilia, who seemed the more down-to-earth and strangely the more mature of all the sisters, asked for permission to retreat to her room. Exhausted by such pathetic behavior as if it was the last straw, she jumped off the window, before getting fatally pierced by the garden’s fence. “It was the beginning of the end” said one of the boys in voice-over. The Lisbon parents began a close-knit watch on their four-remaining daughter.
With its delicate pale color palette, its dreamy aesthetic and its casting of the loveliest blond heads, The Virgin Suicides is a movie that shines through its poetic photography. But its ethereal beauty is only a means to transmit emotions, and feelings in the most accurate way. The audience observes the girls through slight moments of their daily life. Brief pieces that their secret admirers are trying to put together in order to understand the enigma that are the Lisbon sisters. In those real and fantasized flashes, the girls appear in delicate 70s floating gowns with floral prints and sweet colors. Reminiscent of nightwear, this delicate wardrobe accentuates, on one hand, the feeling of confinement that the four girls trapped inside the house, and often lying on the floor of their bedroom, are living. On the other hand, a nightdress is childish, innocent and embodies the sense of being imprisoned inside a children’s body. “We knew that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death,” said wisely one of the boys at the end of the movie. The Lisbon girls and especially Lux’s constant crave for attention came from their parents’ old-fashioned morals. While it is healthy for teenagers in their introspective period to oppose their parents, Lisbon’s girls also have to face an era clash. The austere and conservative thinking of the 50's and 60’s versus the libertarian 70s which dig even deeper the gap between the girls and their parents.
One day, Trip Fontaine, the heartthrob of high school in love with Lux, asked her if she would go to the prom with him. Since going to the homecoming dance is something forbidden in the Lisbon family, Trip went asking Lux’s father for permission. In fairness to all his girls, Mr Lisbon accepted on the condition that Trip found three other football teammates to go to the ball with his daughters. On the day (with no hesitation the happiest of the movie) the cheerful girls wore long pale dresses lengthened by their mother, a white flower bouquet offered by their prom date pinned on the chest. It is the first night of freedom for the girls, the first experience of partying, flirting and acting on their own. Hiding behind the bleachers, drinking peach schnapps and making out, Lux and Trip were happily elected king and queen of the ball. After that, on the football field under the stars, Trip and Lux slept together for the first time. Summoned to go back before midnight, the older sisters went home without her.
Lulled by Highschool Lover from the French electronic duo Air, Lux woke up alone in the middle of the school court, before heading home in a cab. In this foggy and mute sequence, the song completely overwhelms the image as Lux’s feeling of loneliness strengthens. All along the movie, the original score of Air, carries the unwieldy emotions of the Lisbon girls. It was in London that Sofia Coppola discovered Air’s Premiers Symtôme album while writing the script of the movie. She was immediately drawn towards Air’s music’s ability to convey a dreamy and kind of memory-like atmosphere which was exactly the subtle mood of the movie. Thus, she asked them to do The Virgins Suicides’ score. For other moments, she flawlessly chose period songs like Heart’s Crazy On You or 10cc I’m not in Love. If music is substantial to the movie in itself, it is as crucial for Lux and her sisters to accompany them in their solitude. After the homecoming episode the girls were locked inside the house and withdrew from school as the Lisbon parents buried themselves in belief and drastic austerity...
One Sunday Lux’s mother compelled her to burn her rock records on the advice of a spirited church sermon. Begging for her Aerosmith vinyl, Lux’s fading began. Momentarily saved by their interactions with the neighbor’s boys, the sisters lived for a while through Morse coded messages, and songs heard through late phone calls. Finally, they organized a midnight escape meeting, and the boys were left lifelong traumatized by the tragic spectacle of their domino suicides.
The Virgin Suicide premiered at the 1999 Cannes Festival, and received great critics praising mainly Coppola’s directing, the cast and the set design. During the year 2000, it received a quite limited release in the United States but was really appreciated all around Europe and Japan. Twenty years later now, the movie continues to resonate with teen generations from all around the world. Showing the movie to her 13-year-old daughter, Coppola felt very glad that she could relate so many years after its release. “There’s not a lot of art that treats that age and era of life with a lot of respect. I’m proud I got to make something about teens concerning serious topics, where they were complex people” confesses Coppola in a Vogue interview this year. The Virgin Suicides brings each time its audience to a hypnotic contemplation of the worst-case scenario of teenage’s blueness. A contagious melancholia that would make every person reconsider the depth of the querying journey that is becoming an adult.