4D — Fall 2018
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Sofia Coppola’s ‘The Virgin Suicides’ and the loneliness of girlhood

At the tender age of 28, Sofia 
Coppola (“The Beguiled”) wrote 
and directed the 1999 drama, 
“The Virgin Suicides,” based off 
of the 1993 Jeffrey Eugenides 
novel of the same name. The 
film set Coppola apart from her 
legendary father — Francis Ford 
Coppola of “Godfather” fame 
— and highlighted her dreamy, 
unique and definitively brilliant 
style. Coppola the younger has 
gone on to write and direct 
award-winning films such as 
“Lost in Translation” (2003), 
“Marie Antoinette” (2006) and 
“Somewhere” (2010), making her 
an auteur in her own right.
For one night and one night 
only, 
the 
Michigan 
Theater 
screened Coppola’s first film, 
“The Virgin Suicides,” as a part 
of the nationwide initiative called 
Science on Screen, which pairs 
films with science speakers. “The 
Virgin Suicides” was screened in 
conjunction with national youth 
speaker Jim Tuman on the teen 
suicide epidemic. Tuman spoke 
about his own experiences with 
suicide, from clients to parents 
to fan mail. Tuman reiterated 
how the film depicts loneliness as 
not necessarily being by oneself, 
but a sort of existential solitude 
that can be felt even in the most 
crowded of places.
“The Virgin Suicides” takes 
place in Grosse Pointe, Mich. in 
the mid ’70s. The film centers 
on the tragically beautiful and 

sheltered Lisbon sisters. The five 
girls — Therese, Mary, Bonnie, 
Lux and Cecilia — are an enigma 
to the neighborhood boys. Told 
from the boys’ perspective, the 
audience looks upon the Lisbon 
girls with the obsessive and 
voyeuristic, telescope-clad eyes 
of hormone-heavy, brace-faced, 
adolescent boys. The story starts 
the summer when the youngest 
sister, 
Cecilia 
(Hanna 
Hall, 
“Visible Scars”), slit her wrists in 
the bath tub at the age of 13. She 
survived her suicide attempt, but 
with it came a plethora or rumors, 
whispers 
and 
neighborhood 
gossip. The film approaches the 
taboo and elicit topic of suicide 
with finesse and care. While 
the subject matter is bleak and 
objectively 
tragic, 
Coppola 
applies a dreamy, hazy sepia 
filter to counteract the pain. The 
film — at points — is hilarious. 
Using Giovanni Ribisi’s (“Sneaky 
Pete”) ambiguous narration as 
an omnipresent documentarian, 
commenting and criticizing the 
story from within through the 
third-person perspective of the 
novel. The film raises questions on 
helicopter parenting, fetishizing 
tragedy and the loneliness of 
girlhood with such expertise and 
nuance that it is hard to believe it 
was Coppola’s first feature film.
Kirsten 
Dunst 
(“The 
Beguiled”) steals the screen as 
the flirtatious and rebellious 
Lux Lisbon. The former child 
star commands the screen with 
her seductive gaze and youthful 
vigor, permitting an abundance 

of eager eyes to fall in love with 
her. Dunst’s Lux personifies the 
film’s message of isolation — the 
way it feels to be surrounded by 
people but still alone. She is the 
object of unattainable desire, an 
untouchable celebrity drenched 
in self-doubt and overcome with 
the intoxicating and isolating 
feeling of total and complete 
solitude. 
Trip 
Fontaine, 
the 
epitome of the ’70s high school 
sex god, played by a baby-faced 
Josh Hartnett (“6 Below: Miracle 
on the Mountain”), is infatuated 
by Lux’s indifference towards 
him. Interestingly, Trip is the only 
one we see in the future as the 
narrator details the events from 
a place far, far away from Grosse 
Pointe. Future Trip is no sex god, 
rather an institutionalized man-
child, still thinking about the 
night he took Lux’s innocence on 
an empty football field. Lux and 
her sisters left a dark hole in the 
psyche of their neighborhood, 
turning their lives into more of 
a myth than a reality. Coppola 
beautifully captures the pains of 
girlhood, from boys to tampons 
to homecoming dances. What the 
audience hears is the narration 
of a fan boy, recalling the girls 
he never understood, but what 
they see is the unequivocal and 
crippling solitude of adolescence. 
This dissonance is the hallmark 
of Coppola’s filmmaking, creating 
a dialectic between the internal 
and external, the seen and the 
unseen.
In addition to marking the 
beginning of Coppola’s successful 

career, “The Virgin Suicides” 
highlights some of the auteur’s 
most identifiable and appealing 
stylistic 
choices. 
Coppola’s 
photography 
background 
is 
evident in her films from the 
concentration on framing and 
composition. She clearly takes 
her time on the art of the shot, 
creating tiny masterpieces within 
the larger masterpiece of her 
motion pictures. Framing is a 
key aspect of the director’s work, 
highlighting 
the 
character’s 
feelings and state of mind by 
showing, not telling — using the 
actor’s expressions and body 
language to capture the mood. 
The soundtrack plays like a high 
school mix tape from the ’70s, 

featuring the Bee Gees, Steely 
Dan and Boston. The original 
score, conveying the ethereal 
tone of the film, was composed by 
the French duo Air.
On Apr. 24, the Criterion 
Collection 
will 
release 
a 
digital restoration of the film, 
including interviews with the 
actors, 
a 
documentary 
from 
the director’s mother Eleanor 
Coppola, “Making of ‘The Virgin 
Suicides’” and the director’s 
1998 
short 
film, 
“Lick 
the 
Star.” The Criterion Collection 
beautifully sums up, that: “‘The 
Virgin Suicides’ conjures the 
ineffable melancholy of teenage 
longing and ennui,” adding that 
“the film secured a place for 

its director in the landscape of 
American independent cinema 
and has become a coming-of-age 
touchstone.”
The fleeting, ghostly beauty of 
Coppola’s masterful first foray 
into her own coming-of-age as 
a filmmaker is iconic in its own 
right, paving the way for female 
filmmakers 
to 
make 
movies 
that matter. Just like the brief, 
transitory lives of the Lisbon 
girls, Coppola’s film lingers long 
after the screen fades to black. It 
is a true testament to Coppola’s 
talent that the film has remained 
so current. Based on the ’70s, 
released in the ’90s and revived 
in 2018, the film is still relevant as 
ever for generations of girls.

BECKY PORTMAN
Senior Arts Editor

PARAMOUNT CLASSICS

