The Virgin Suicides

5/10

USA 1999, dir. Sofia Coppola, stars Kirsten Dunst, Kathleen Turner

When sunlight enters a movie camera, the lens refracts it into a six-pointed star. Most directors aim to avoid this off-putting effect, but Sofia Coppola, in her debut feature The Virgin Suicides, deploys it as a deliberate technique. It's part of her approach to emphasise the rough edges that first-time directors often try the hardest to hide, and to put them to the service of her material, a shimmering, refractory fable of adolescence set in the sun-dappled mid-seventies.

If The Virgin Suicides fails as a movie, and I think it does, then the fault probably lies as much with Jeffrey Eugenides' source novel as with any wrong moves on the part of Coppola, although her decision to use copious amounts of voice-over narration - taken, I presume, from Eugenides - comes close to fatally torpedoing the whole enterprise. This narration, spoken by Giovanni Ribisi, gives the film a very unwelcome air of The Wonder Years, with an unseen, unnamed speaker recalling his formative years with a yucky tone of bemused, baffled sentimentality.

I can't believe it's a coincidence that films of this retrospective genre which dispense with narration - such as Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused - invariably work better than those which feel the need to have an off-screen voice explaining what we're seeing on screen - Stand By Me springs to mind. Narration in a film is a dangerous business, usually indicative of a director who can't tell a story with images. It takes the ingenuities of a Terrence Malick (Badlands, The Thin Red Line) to really make it work - and even he came a cropper when he sank Days Of Heaven beneath a torrent of off-screen verbiage.

But, as I said earlier, I would lay the blame for The Virgin Suicides' shortcomings with Eugenides's essentially implausible plot. As the narrator unhelpfully informs us right at the very start, this is the story of how five teenage sisters killed themselves in a sleepy Detroit suburb in 1975. The suicides come in two stages - "first to go" is the youngest, 13-year-old Cecilia. Some months pass before, on a single night, her four sisters follow her into oblivion. Although Kathleen Turner's ludicrously strict matriarch is clearly the chief culprit, much is made of how the specific reasons behind the suicides always remained a mystery. The film is careful to avoid any simplistic explanations, which is fair enough. But ambiguity will only get you so far in terms of believability, and the end results are oddly hollow and unsatisfying.

The Virgin Suicides does contain many pleasures along the way, however. Coppola does best when cutting loose of plot altogether, during fantasy sequences in which various sisters are photographed in dreamy, woozy, very seventies fashion, lazing in cornfields, while the soundtrack - by Air - wafts them and us into an endless, impossibly blue sky of six-pointed suns. These ethereal moments are the closest the film ever comes to understanding the motivations of the Lisbon girls, who otherwise seem to operate on an inaccessibly different, at times almost Stepford Wives-like, plane to everyone else in the film, and to the audience as well.

It may not be an accident that the most effective part of the movie is also the most conventional - or perhaps Josh Hartnett is such a phenomenally centrifugal performer that he's capable of single-handedly pulling a formless movie into shape around him. His Trip Fontaine - absurdly self-obsessed, endlessly preening king-teen high school stud - struts into the film at around the half-hour mark and, while he's around, the whole affair becomes energised. The other Lisbon girls fade into the background as Lux (Kirsten Dunst) comes into sharp focus. Lux is the only girl in school who isn't falling all over Trip - and of course she's the only one he's interested in. His desperate, puppydog pursuit provides The Virgin Suicides with most of its funniest - and most touching - moments, and also its most remarkable image - a prom queen waking alone at dawn on an vast, empty football field, her tiara damp with the cold morning dew.

But that's the last we - and Lux - see of Trip, and it's all downhill from there. Hartnett is probably the best thing in the movie, but Coppola's inexperience nearly ruins the effect of his performance by bookending it with footage of a middle-aged Trip (played, in a nice casting move, by 70s pretty-boy Michael Paré) being interviewed about his memories. Like many aspects of the movie, you can see the idea, but it just doesn't quite come off.

The two basic questions any film review must address are A) What is the film about? and B) Is it any good? I'm not sure this review has provided answers to either of these questions, but in my defence I honestly think the problem lies in the film itself, rather than my reactions to it. I don't actually know what point, if any, Coppola is trying to make with The Virgin Suicides, but whatever it is, I didn't get it. Writing about film is seldom absolute, and there will no doubt be many viewers (teenage girls???) who go a bundle over this particular movie. I just think this sort of thing has been done so much better in other films - and a trip to the video store for Dazed and Confused will hopefully bear me out.