The Virgin Suicides
Jul. 18th, 2019 07:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerNow that I’ve watched almost all of Sofia Coppola’s movies (only The Bling Ring remains), I’ve come up with the Fluttery White Dress theory of her work: the movies with a high proportion of fluttery white dresses are good (The Beguiled wins top billing with All Fluttery White Dresses All the Time), while movies like Somewhere which have no fluttery white dresses at all struggle to find their way.
The Virgin Suicides has a high fluttery white dress quotient and is therefore pretty good, provided that you go into it with the understanding that, despite the title, this movie is not interested in a searching examination of (a) virginity, (b) teen girls’ sexuality, or (c) suicide. This is a movie about Aesthetic.
In this way it’s quite faithful to the book that it’s adapting, Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, which is singularly uninterested in explaining why the Lisbon sisters committed suicide or indeed in differentiating their characters at all: the youngest two sisters, Cecilia and Lux, get a few character traits, but the older three exist as a corporate dreamy blonde unit. Similarly, the neighborhood boys who yearn after them never gain individual names, but are simply an indistinguishable we. (In the movie, the boys are all smoothly handsome and dark-haired, a masculine mirror to the Lisbon sisters’ blonde prettiness.)
It’s an aesthetic about nostalgia - a nostalgia that is partly about a specific time and place (1970s Michigan, portrayed in the bright yet oddly desaturated colors of a Polaroid) but also about a state of being: nostalgia for youth, dreaminess, the age when a group of friends can lie around living on daydreams.
Like many of Coppola’s movies, it breaks many of the Hollywood rules about movie-making. There’s not much of a plot. The characters have a dreamlike quality that is almost archetypal: these clean-cut dark-haired boys are standing in for all teenage boys pining after unattainable girls anyway. But in its own odd way it works: it’s an absorbing movie while you watch it, and it lingers with you after it’s gone.
The Virgin Suicides has a high fluttery white dress quotient and is therefore pretty good, provided that you go into it with the understanding that, despite the title, this movie is not interested in a searching examination of (a) virginity, (b) teen girls’ sexuality, or (c) suicide. This is a movie about Aesthetic.
In this way it’s quite faithful to the book that it’s adapting, Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, which is singularly uninterested in explaining why the Lisbon sisters committed suicide or indeed in differentiating their characters at all: the youngest two sisters, Cecilia and Lux, get a few character traits, but the older three exist as a corporate dreamy blonde unit. Similarly, the neighborhood boys who yearn after them never gain individual names, but are simply an indistinguishable we. (In the movie, the boys are all smoothly handsome and dark-haired, a masculine mirror to the Lisbon sisters’ blonde prettiness.)
It’s an aesthetic about nostalgia - a nostalgia that is partly about a specific time and place (1970s Michigan, portrayed in the bright yet oddly desaturated colors of a Polaroid) but also about a state of being: nostalgia for youth, dreaminess, the age when a group of friends can lie around living on daydreams.
Like many of Coppola’s movies, it breaks many of the Hollywood rules about movie-making. There’s not much of a plot. The characters have a dreamlike quality that is almost archetypal: these clean-cut dark-haired boys are standing in for all teenage boys pining after unattainable girls anyway. But in its own odd way it works: it’s an absorbing movie while you watch it, and it lingers with you after it’s gone.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-18 12:28 pm (UTC)Omg, I think you've discovered the key to Sofia Coppola!
I think The Virgin Suicides is a pretty special debut. I saw it on release and some of those images are still haunting me all those years later. And it's rare, I think, to see a director whose voice is so strong from the get go. All the hallmarks are already there!
no subject
Date: 2019-07-18 01:36 pm (UTC)And yes, it's stunning how clear Sofia Coppola's aesthetic is right from the start. Not only did she know *exactly* what she wanted, but she knew how to get it right out of the gate, and her vision is quite unlike anything that anyone else was (or is) doing.