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Kirsten Dunst
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Thirteen-year-old Cecilia Lisbon (Hanna R. Hall) fiddles self-consciously with her bracelets. It's her first party, and she stays busy watching everyone else watching her. It doesn't matter that her four older sisters taped the bracelets to her wrists. Cecilia is certain that everyone can still see the bandages that cover the scars of her recent suicide attempt. So she wants to leave.
"We'll just have to have fun without you," Cecilia's mother (Kathleen Turner) yells out. But Cecilia isn't interested in parties. She has other plans.
Sofia Coppola's debut as writer/director, The Virgin Suicides, is a dark and dreamlike slice of American pie. Seldom are moviemade teens portrayed so realistically. Coppola keeps her adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides' 1993 novel romance-free. When tragedy strikes the beautiful Lisbon sisters, the emotional impact is both heart-wrenching and complicated.
It's 1975 and the Lisbon sisters -- Cecilia (Hall); Lux (Kirsten Dunst), 14; Bonnie (Chelse Swain), 15; Mary (A.J. Cook), 16; Therese (Leslie Hayman), 17 -- are mesmerizing the boys of their affluent Michigan suburb. The Lisbon quintet seems to have it all: beauty, promise and a caring family.
Everything begins to unravel when Cecilia throws herself out of a second-floor window. Her death haunts the neighborhood The Lisbon family isolates itself from the community. Things begin to return to normal after a local jock named Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett) gains permission from Mr. Lisbon (James Woods) to take Lux to the homecoming dance. The catch is that Lux's sisters tag along. This one moment of social bliss doesn't last long. Nobody lives happily ever after in The Virgin Suicides.
Unlike recent youth romances (Here on Earth, Down to You), teen slashers (Scream 1-3, Urban Legend) and goofball comedies (American Pie, Clueless), The Virgin Suicides portrays its teen characters with a poignant deftness.
Coppola stays true to the fatalistic humor of Eugenides' novel. Teen anxieties are comical by nature. Basically, you can't help but laugh at the antics of horny boys. Much of The Virgin Suicides plays like some cinematic homage to heavy petting. Lux and Trip spend most of homecoming underneath the gymnasium stage. Their kisses turn sloppy after drinking a flask of Peach Schnapps. When Lux is crowned homecoming queen, the plastic tiara tilts clumsily on her head.
Balloons fall. Streamers dangle from the ceiling and '70s rock courtesy of Styx blasts from the school sound system
"Come sail away. Come sail away. Come sail away with me!"
It's inevitable that the homecoming queen and king find their way to the football field. Young love is supposed to be foolish.
Turner turns discipline into a vicious art form as the dumpy Mrs. Lisbon. It's hilarious just how frigid one woman can be.
"Lux, please put your sweater on this instant!," she tells the flirtiest of her teen-age daughters.
Woods stays surprisingly silent as the spineless father. For an actor known for his dramatic pyrotechnics, he is surprisingly banal.
But it's Dunst's Lolita-like performance as Lux who grabs hold of The Virgin Suicides' spotlight. Flaxen blonde hair covers her cherubic face. She challenges her puritanical mother by sunbathing on the front lawn in her bikini. Lux, brought to mischievous life by Dunst, is a wholesome nymphet who can't help but wink knowingly at the audience.
By film's end, Coppola herself emerges as The Virgin Suicide's brightest star. She recieved plenty of derision for playing Mary Corleone for her father, Francis Ford Coppola in The Godfather, Part III. Now, as a sucessful filmmaker, Coppola gets to film slap back at her critics.
After stints as a photographer and a fashion designer, Coppola's impressive debut behind the camera is genetic irony. The Virgin Suicides is such an assured tale of emotional loss and sexual longing that it proposes the idea of filmmaking as a family trait. It's difficult to imagine that someone else could have articulated the Lisbon sisters' story with greater sensitivity than Coppola.
Without her famous father's cinematic flash, Coppola emphasizes storytelling in The Virgin Suicides. Crafting the film in simple fashion is what allows its adolescent heartache to step forward. But Coppola allows herself one brief moment of film artistry. The neighborhood boys place their phone against the record player in order to communicate with the Lisbon sisters across the street. Theirs is a musical exchange.
"Hello, it's me," warbles across the phone lines. When the Lisbon girls reply in kind, Coppola splits the screen through the middle. The effect is mesmerizing.
Coppola takes full advantage of the film's Brady Bunch setting. The wood paneling, console television, bad oil paintings and plastic flowers that decorate the Lisbon house become their own character.
The Virgin Suicides is a cautionary tale, following in the footsteps of past teen dramas like Rebel Without A Cause, Blackboard Jungle and River's Edge. It's blatantly apparent that dark forces lurk behind the Lisbon's manicured lawns. What's impressive is how Coppola never allows the film to turn preachy or didactic. She is a kinder, gentler, female David Lynch. She juggles her drama well, maintaining a balance of sugar, spice and everything not so nice. You laugh at the boys' sexual bravado, but it's the film's troubling scenes that linger long after you leave the theater.
American film has tackled stories about adolescent lust, suburban dysfunction and shocking behavior before (Dazed and Confused, American Graffiti, West Side Story and most recently, American Beauty). But the Lisbon sisters aren't juvenile delinquents. There is little drug use among the teens in this affluent suburb. Alcohol abuse centers around a flask of peach schnapps. Basically, The Virgin Suicides takes us back to a time and place that's pre-AIDS, void of teen pregnancies, crime or street violence. Really, the only violence in The Virgin Suicides is the violence the Lisbon sisters inflict upon themselves. In this neighborhood, the innocent die young from a lack of freedom and social interaction.
Coppola keeps her tabloid-friendly topic poignant, emotionally moving and dramatically realistic.
The Lisbon sisters are doomed despite the fact that they're anything but wild things. The Virgin Suicide reminds us that teenage lust and teenage suicide are more timeless than we realize.
CityBeat Grade: A
