the virgin suicides (1999)
One of the Criterion Channel's new collections for this month is "The 90s do the 70s", in which gen X film directors in the 90s make movies about the culture of the 70s. I had not, as I usually do, planned in advance what to watch, and I saw The Virgin Suicides in there, and though I'm pretty sure I watched this when I was a teen, I remembered very little. (Spoilers follow. Also, content warning for discussions of suicide.)
While with Paris, Texas I didn't remember it because I didn't really take the time to sit with and reflect on the movie, in this case I am fairly confident I didn't remember it because I was not capable of parsing what was happening at the time. I was a sheltered teen surrounded by conservative evangelicals; I barely knew that alcohol was a thing and I'm pretty sure I couldn't have told you what a marijuana was if you paid me. I don't think I could have understood anything that happened on the screen; how could I possibly remember it?
Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides is the story of the conservative religious Lisbon family's five daughters, as told by the teenage boys who lusted after them from afar; we only ever really get to know them from the outside. But while often female characters are denied interiority in film because the director merely doesn't care about them, here the choice is deliberate. The adults in the film treat the girls as if, because they are teens, they aren't real people with actual agency; our narrators, despite being mainly interested in them because they are attractive, at least clearly acknowledge that each of these young women is a fully realized human with a rich internal life of her own--and with each of their deaths, that life is lost forever. So we are denied the why. We are left to guess, to speculate; we get stolen glimpses of life inside their house, we pass them in the halls of school, but we are only ever allowed into their world as a guest.
They seem to long for freedom; it is only the suicide attempt of the youngest, Cecilia, that persuades their mother to allow them to (painfully awkwardly) socialize with (as the therapist would have it) "males of [their] age". But it's at that awkward gathering that Cecilia's suicide occurs; did she find the casual cruelty the guests were displaying too much to bear? Did she feel unseen? Certainly one did not get the feeling when talking to the therapist or reading the news reports about this that anyone saw her, or cared what was happening in her mind.
The girls are pulled out of school and effectively imprisoned in their home after Lux breaks curfew at homecoming to have sex with her new boyfriend on the football field; she falls asleep there and he abandons her to wake up there alone the following morning. Our already limited exposure to them--their jubilation at being allowed to go out to the school dance, the way they seemed so animated while being out and about and free from their home--is gone, now; all we see is that their dad, the somewhat absent-minded math teacher, seems to also be unraveling a little bit at school. The rest is coded messages in the window and songs played over the phone.
And then they invite the boys over to discover their bodies after they all kill themselves. And that's it. They leave little fragments behind, which our narrators collect and analyze and obsess over, while the rest of the town moves on, treats them as a joke, and otherwise tries to forget. Five lives, five small eternities, gone forever, while their mother laments that her girls never wanted for anything. There was so much love in their house, she says.
The mystery, of course, is the point; we don't know these characters, we can't know them. We take from movies like this what we bring with us; to me, this is a story about the importance of being seen, in a way the Lisbon daughters are denied by their religious family. But the beauty of a story like this, as told in cinema, is you can do so much with so little: a tapestry of images and sounds and suggestions.