Sofia Coppola
Il giardino delle vergini suicide

There are 5 blonde girls, we imagine them that way because they are actually wandering silhouettes covered in shadow. Wandering apparitions at the edge of twilight, with the hypnotic consistency of formalin.

No psychological introspection, what grounds stories in cinema, is the feeling of Time.

Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides is one of those films that is felt more than it is watched. It is not just a story of teenagers and death, but a sensory experience, a journey into nostalgia and tragedy filtered through an ethereal and rarefied lens. Its strength lies not only in the dreamy direction or the screenplay that leaves ample room for the unsaid: it is also in its soundtrack, which intertwines with the narrative as if it were a silent but omnipresent character. The music of Air, particularly their album "The Virgin Suicides," is the sonic soul of the film. Their electronic melodies, suspended between dream and nightmare, echo the lives of the Lisbon sisters and the mystery surrounding them, marking the rhythm of a tragedy that unfolds with the lightness of a distant vision.

The film is set in a Michigan suburb in the 1970s, and everything has the flavor of confused memory, almost an illusion. The light-saturated photography envelops the story, creating an effect that seems like a mosaic of moments chasing each other. Air's soundtrack, with tracks like "Playground Love," accompanies this play of images with a liquid, fluid melody that flows through the scenes like the wind through the girls' hair. The delicate and sensual voice singing an unexpressed passion is the perfect reflection of the Lisbon sisters' repressed desires and the fascination the boys feel for them, an attraction they cannot explain but which obsesses them.

The Lisbons are five, made of light and shadow, suspended between childlike innocence and a tragic self-awareness.

The outside world observes them with melancholic wonder, but no one truly understands their condition. The incomprehension here is more astral than genetic.

Their home is an impregnable fortress for anyone who tries to enter. The majestic and solemn guardians are the overprotective parents, incapable of understanding their daughters' growing desire for freedom.

The music is sufficiently sinister and sharply cuts through the atmosphere with pieces that seem to breathe the same suffocating air of the household interior. "Bathroom Girl," with its hypnotic rhythm, evokes moments of isolation and silence within those walls, where every little rebellion is watched with fear and every dream is born extinguished.

The catalyzing event is the suicide of Cecilia, the youngest. Her act is an enigma, a message no one knows how to decipher. It is just the beginning of an inevitable countdown, yet at the same time distant. The film's images do not dwell on death explicitly: it's as if it happens elsewhere.

As if even this Death were an inevitable consequence of something we do not fully understand.

The true moment of freedom for the Lisbons comes with the illusion of an escape. The boys, the film's narrators, believe they have saved them, have snatched them from their fate. But freedom does not truly exist, and the dream of escape turns out to be just an already-written epilogue. When they enter the house to take them away, they find nothing but death. The music becomes ethereal, almost imperceptible. "Suicide Underground," dark and engulfing, fills the space with a heaviness that seems to float in the room, an elegy made of synthetic sounds and suspended breaths.

The Lisbons become legends, ghosts of a past that no one can explain. The boys grow up with the weight of the mystery, unable to understand why it happened, unable to accept that they never really knew those girls they loved from afar. Air's music, which accompanied every moment with eerie grace, lingers in the air even after the film ends, like the echo of a dream that never quite fades away.