FFWD Weekly
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Film by Jaime Frederick The Virgin Suicides starring James Woods, Kathleen Turner and Kirsten Dunst directed by Sofia Coppola opens Friday, May 19 Most young directors making their first feature film don’t have the backing of one of cinema’s great masters, nor do they have the budget to realize all their half-conceived dreams on celluloid. This is, perhaps, as it should be, as many first-time directors don’t have enough restraint when it comes to putting pretty pictures on the screen. Half mad with the novelty of creation, they abandon all critical judgments and any reasonable attempts to edit the inessential – the bigger the budget they’re given, the freer they are to run amok with their precious movies. Of course, one can only speculate that this is what happened to Sofia Coppola as she adapted Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel, The Virgin Suicides, for the screen. It’s impossible to deny that Coppola’s film is ambitious in its scope, attempting to use multiple points of view, a large ensemble cast, ’70s period detail and a strange tone of suburban magic realism to deliver an elegy of idealized adolescence and lost naïvete. It is also an incontrovertible mess, inconsistent in its narrative voices, muddled, flabby and, worst of all, dull. Shifting perspective back and forth from the five Lisbon sisters, who are the virgins of the title (including Kirsten Dunst as the enigmatic Lux), to the numerous pubescent neighbourhood boys, who pursue them despite Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon’s puritanical rebuffs, only serves to confuse the matter. Coppola seems to lack the assuredness as a director to pull off delicate maneuvers, one moment identifying the girls as her protagonists, the next the boys, all while the narrative voiceover hurtles forth from some time in the future, one of the lustful boys speaking as a grown man unable to forget the mystifying allure and strange demise of the Lisbon girls. Coppola’s examination of the mythologization of youth in all its intransigent beauty is not a novel idea. Apparently, her film sticks quite closely to Eugenides’s book, though, and insofar as it offers a parody of neo-Romantic idealism, it’s more than a little bit clever. Given the title of the film, it wouldn’t be giving away too much to say that in Eugenides’s story at least, no sex equals death rather than the classically gothic alternative. This frankness with respect to adolescent female sexuality, and the repressive societal attitudes toward it, is probably the very best thing about The Virgin Suicides. While most inane teen flicks only superficially ride the slick, supple surface of adolescent hell, Coppola’s film attempts to drag us right back down into the muck, hinting that its misery is perpetually inescapable for any who ever suffered it. In that sense, despite the film’s highly stylized lyricism, these young women are more realistic than most screen teens today. Coppola’s feminist tract fails, though, in its refusal to grapple more deeply with the emotional lives of its female characters. There are too many ciphers here to provide any audience engagement, so when the film breaks down near the end, with surrealist sequences that are almost embarrassingly out of place in this movie, one suspects she’s tried to incorporate too much of Eugenides’s novel. Her attempts to remain true to the movie’s source are laudable, but Coppola needs to take stock of her abilities as a young filmmaker and focus, focus, focus.

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