Hailed as a modern masterpiece and at the same time a piece of self-defeating, nepotistic, pretension, The Virgin Suicides demands attention. The story of the five Lisbon sisters who commit group suicide is impossible to cast into any contemporary genre category and perhaps this is where any resentment to the film starts. I�m positive people saw this film expecting another teenage rites of passage tale. They saw the cast list of Kirsten Dunst and Josh Hartnett and thought they�d struck doe-eyed, angst ridden, feel-good gold. They hadn�t.
The Virgin Suicides hits a lot higher, and deals in stuff you not going to find in the glut of recent high school movies. Adapted from Jeffrey Eugenides� novel, the film�s concern is the mystery and misunderstanding that accompanies adolescence. A group of neighbourhood boys struggle to understand the sisters, what makes them tick, and it is through their comprehension, or lack of it, that we are informed. The girls are elevated to mythical beings in this film. Their elusiveness is key, it�s what makes them attractive and mesmerising. It�s what attracts the high school stud Trip Fontaine (Hartnett) to one of the sisters, Lux (Dunst). His hormone induced bravado, usually potent to the female population of the school corridors, is exposed as shallow and insecure in the face of her authentic supremacy. This is typical of The Virgin Suicides.
Those staples of the teenage cultural portrait: sexual curiosity, inadequacy and irrational love are all handled here with deft cynicism and things never stray into the sentimental. We might laugh at the teenagers as they cram under the stage at the high school prom to swig peach schnapps but Coppola�s direction treats the experience with great tenderness. This film has a deep affection for youth, without ever forgetting the cruelty of being that age. The Virgin Suicides never lets us forget that the pains that these kids feel are real. Amongst all recent teen films, I can only think of one instance in American Pie, where high school life is treated as anything other than something to be trivialised.
Kathleen Turner and James Woods provide heavyweight support to their young colleagues, to the effect that the film avoids the easy sin of allowing the adult characters to become ogres who are impossible to sympathise with. The whole movie is beautifully balanced in every way. The adult voiceover from one of the then boys, gives the sense that what we�re being told has an inevitable end, a legend passed around the suburbs, told between teenage boys, a story that might decipher the confusion they feel. �We knew the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to make the noise that seemed to fascinate them.� |
