Sofia Coppola
Il giardino delle vergini suicide

The Virgin Suicides - in Italy: Il giardino delle vergini suicide - is the first film by Sofia Coppola, the daughter of Francis Ford.

The film follows the plot of the book by Jeffrey Eugenides with the same title and features among its main cast Kirsten Dunst (a very beloved actress by the director, so much that she will call her back as the protagonist for Marie Antoinette).

The Virgin Suicides is a tale about the dichotomy of the sacred and the profane, about adolescence crystallized and mythologized by memory even in its most tragic aspects, in this case death.

The story is about five ordinary girls from the puritanical and respectable American suburbia of the ?70s, the Lisbon sisters, and it is seen through the eyes of a couple of boys who live next door.

The narrative is retrospective, the collective narrator is now grown up, but still has in mind the blonde locks of the Lisbon sisters, their young and perfect faces albeit veiled by the boredom of a life spent between home and school with their bigoted father and mother in tow.

The typical teenage restlessness is evidently amplified by the sisters’ family situation and is showcased by the girls in line with their character: there's the one who attempts suicide already in the opening scenes, the apathetic one, and the rebel seeking all the emotions life can offer her.

Coppola does not delve into a macabre fairy tale to describe the course of events but chooses a dreamlike key; the girls' lives are carried on to the epilogue in an atmosphere between dream and reality, muffled like the existence they lead from the moment their parents literally lock them in at home.

The personalities of the five sisters and the reason for their actions are not deeply explored, because ultimately the narrators only have a few real elements to talk about, while it's mainly the idea they have of the Lisbon sisters that takes the lead.

The boys show them now as woodland nymphs, now as enchanting sirens with whom they only have sporadic contact either before or after their seclusion: a Beatles song heard over the phone, a page read from a found diary, a frame of life seen through binoculars.

The plot, enriched by the dreamlike environment given by the lighting, photography, and music by Air, makes the film a good communicator of what's in the mind of a teenager: everything projected towards love, passion, the future unknown, but which nevertheless is dreamed, imagined, and partly begins to be truly lived.

In this case, the Lisbon sisters decide to petrify their existence at the start of their journey because of invisible bonds that do not allow them to proceed, but in the end, those who move forward do not act so differently, they do not deny this impression of adolescent life, but instead idealize it, lament it, and preserve it intact in memory.

In conclusion, it must be said that Coppola's first attempt was not bad at all and I dare say that the vision of the film manages to communicate even more than the book: it is precisely femininity which seemed more convincingly expressed by the director to me, but on the other hand, this is the theme most dear to her.

On this note, I conclude by recommending the viewing of this film as well as the two subsequent ones (Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette); indeed together with The Virgin Suicides they create an interesting trilogy on women: be they girls, wives, or queens.