A group of male friends become obsessed with five mysterious sisters who are sheltered by their strict, religious parents in suburban Detroit in the mid 1970s.
EN
“The film moves confidently through its opening sequences, establishing its characters and locale with energy and zest. Coppola frequently frames moments as if taking a still photograph, aiding the film’s air of suffocating memory: a mother washing dishes, the assorted clutter of a young girl’s bedroom, or a boy locked in the lonely late-night world inside his headphones. Explosions of energy – the dance, Trip’s stoner-elegant swagger to the spacy wail of ‘Magic Man’ – and a sly, off-balance sense of humour keep the film feeling brisk even as it delves deeper into a world of silent hysteria.”
Mark Olsen1
“The Lisbon girls function as the catalyst for these dreams and come to represent a lost, halcyon past. While the film abounds with entrancing and mesmeric images, a careful reading of these sequences reveals their predication on a host of clichés and acts of wilful reinterpretation. At its most beguiling, the film betrays its own narrative. As the boys/men desperately attempt to relive, recapture, retell and make sense of the Lisbon girls’ tragedy (to render it meaningful), Coppola’s lyrical and metaphorical images exceed the immediate function of representation and elude the grasp of understanding. In other words, the film works on a formal level to unravel the task of making meaning that is set in place by its narrative. Here, the image is used and revealed precisely as a cliché, as Gilles Deleuze (2005) characterises it.”
Anna Rogers2
"At the outset of the film, the boys are seen sitting on the pavement opposite the Lisbons’ home watching the girls get out of the family car; in this sequence, they are akin to the cinematic viewer who is placed in front of a phantasmagorical projection and whose movement is limited. The analogy with a shifting, virtual world is made stronger when the girls’ figures are freeze-framed with their names superimposed onto the frame in an adolescent scrawl. Whilst this short sequence promotes the idea that the girls are merely fantastic images of the boys’ imaginations (images that they create and control and are thus, inherently erroneous), it also is representative of Laura Mulvey’s famous characterisation of the passive female on film who stultifies narrative continuity: ‘(t)he presence of a woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of the story-line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation.’ Interestingly, although it is the female figure who is described as passive by Mulvey, in The Virgin Suicides it is the boys who feel the effect of this incapacitation."
Anna Rogers3
“‘Paramount Classics didn’t really know what to do with it,’ Coppola explained, reflecting on the film in 2018. ‘They were afraid that girls were going to commit suicide if they saw it.’ It’s interesting that this was the studio’s big takeaway – that young women might mimic what they saw, rather than feel understood by it – and hints at the same moral panic within the film.”
Hannah Strong4
- 1Mark Olsen, “The Virgin Suicides reviewed in 2000,” BFI, 20 July 2023. Originally published in the June 2000 issue of Sight and Sound.
- 2Anna Rogers, “Imaging Absence as Abjection: The Female Body in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides,” Screening the Past, 19 February 2018.
- 3Anna Rogers, “Coppola, Sofia,” Senses of Cinema, Issue 45, 2007.
- 4Hannah Strong, Sofia Coppola: Forever Young (Abrams, 2022), 54.
