The Virgin Suicides (1999)

After reading about the only other two women with Best Director Oscar nominations, I realized how little I knew about Sofia Coppola, and that I had been putting off The Virgin Suicides for (literally) forever. So I watched it. The film centers around five mysterious, angelic sisters whose overprotective parents (James Woods and Kathleen Turner) enforce strict rules, but whose story is told from the point of view of a group of boys obsessed with them. Their allure arises from their seeming purity and mystery, and their lives are pieced together through different interactions the boys have with them. Cecilia (Hanna Hall), the youngest, commits suicide at age 13, provoking questions about the family's dynamic. When Lux (Kirsten Dunst), the second youngest at 14, catches the eye of their high school's main stud Trip (Josh Hartnett), she and her sisters are let out into a normal social event for the first time: the homecoming dance, after which events escalate to cause greater tragedies for the family.

While peppered with a series of seemingly mundane conversations and events, The Virgin Suicides does a marvelous job exposing the underbelly of the overly moral middle-class suburban home, propelled by religious fervor and antiquated views of sex. Because we see most of the girls' lives through these fascinated peeping toms' eyes, we are able to draw our own conclusions about the source of the sisters' suicidal urges. Their mother's tyranny and paranoia are wonderfully portrayed by Kathleen Turner, and Kirsten Dunst is fairly compelling as the loose and enigmatic Lux, who loses herself in sex after everything else is taken from her.

This movie is beautifully filmed, with a lot of quiet, thoughtful shots of their decidedly average town or exaggerated "virginal" aspects of the sisters. The script is smart, not allowing everything to be explained or elaborated, but trusting the audience to put the pieces together just as the narrator and his friends have to. It's a little too sparse or ambiguous sometimes, which keeps it from making a bolder statement, but overall it's still engaging and well-made, with good performances and a cool soundtrack from Air. An impressive first full-length feature from Sofia Coppola.

4/5