* * (out of 4)
It's like looking through the photo albums of a stranger. You have a family portrait, and when you study the faces, it looks as though there is something hidden underneath. The only problem is, you will never really know these people, nor connect with them. That is the dilemma of The Virgin Suicides, the debut film from former actress and daughter of a legend, Sofia Coppola.
The Lisbon Family is comprised of a nebbishy math teacher dad (James Woods, nicely cast against type,) a brittle housewife mother (Kathleen Turner,) and their four mysterious, opaque daughters who become the obsession and fascination for four young boys, one of whom is the narrator. We never learn which of these boys actually is narrating the tale, nor do we ever really get to know them.
The entire film is like staring into a murky pool, catching fleeting glimpses of things scuttling underneath. The surface is polished and filled with vital color, and the music (by a French alternative rock group called Air) carries with it a subtle creepiness. However, despite these beautiful elements which get under the skin, there is really very little to hold on to with this movie. Blank girls trapped in a home where they can't go to the school dance, or where their rock and roll records are burned - watched by blank boys who cannot understand them. It feels static, even immobile.
If it does briefly take off, it's in the scenes where a high school punk (Josh Hartnett) falls for one of the girls (Kirsten Dunst) and persuades her father to let him take her to the dance. I don't think there's anything particularly fascinating about their relationship, which is a high school meet cute which goes down a melancholy road of angst, but at least the Hartnett character is formally introduced in the film by a montage of him walking down the school hallways, jacket slung over his shoulder, a cooly detached look on his face. We immediately know who he is and what he's after, and after half an hour or so of cloaked intentions, a clearly indicated individual steps out of the fog.
We know from the top that by the end of that summer, they would all be gone somehow, but we never get a sense of why. It's interesting, considering that the narrator constantly reminds us that each of the five shimmering daughters will commit their virgin suicides by the end of the film. In Kelly Reichardt's short film, Ode, teen suicide is unspoken pain conveyed in the details of mundane lives, which says more than Coppola could hope to say with her empty scenes of depression and above mentioned reminders.
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