A pleasant and vivid memory that often resurfaces in my mind is that of my 13 year-old self lying on my bed early on a Sunday afternoon in 1985, before I went outside to hang out with friends on that day before school started for my eighth grade year, and looking through my older brother's high school yearbook at the pictures of the pretty older girls while the sun was shining through the window and while the song, “Head Over Heels”, by Tears for Fears was playing on the radio. At that moment, I possessed a youthful obliviousness and had little knowledge of the reality beyond the scope of that sun-drenched bedroom window and beyond my comfortable hometown neighborhood, but the entire world seemed mine for the taking. Girls were a mystery to me at the time, but the cheerleaders in the photos of my brother's yearbook were angelic to my eyes, compelling me to daydream about scenarios in the near future when I would be old enough to go out on dates. I realize, in retrospect, that I was not in love with the girls in the photos, but rather in love with my fanciful idealized versions of those girls and with my expectations of getting to know them. Those girls were real people, with real problems, real flaws, and real difficulties, but, in my head at the time, their images represented perfection and promise.
I am now in my 50s, with the high school dances, the high school proms, college rambunctiousness, my post-college career optimism, occasional relationships, travel, and decades of adult experience behind me in the rear view mirror, but my eyes still come close to watering with tears of joy and reminiscence whenever I hear that Tears for Fears song. When I recently saw the band close their set with “Head Over Heels” at an outdoor concert, I zoned out and blissfully went back to that golden moment when I was 13 and looking through the yearbook photos. I understood, with a sudden clarity, why that song and that memory always evoke such happiness in my mind. I am nostalgic not so much for the experiences themselves that would eventually come with age, but for my naive anticipation for those experiences. I am nostalgic for that sense of longing in and of itself. I miss the longing more than anything.
The 1999 film,
The Virgin Suicides, the feature-length directorial debut of Sofia Coppola, acquaints us with the Lisbon girls, five teenage sisters, ages 13 through 17, who all took their own lives over the course of a year in 1974. The brilliance of this screen story is that it is mostly conveyed not through the points of view of the girls themselves, but through the voiceover recollections of male narrators who were adolescent boys when they lived in the same upper-class suburban neighborhood as the girls. Aside from sporadic omniscient-perspective scenes that depict the actual lives of the sisters and their strictly overprotective Catholic parents, the bulk of the film presents the girls as impossibly wondrous objects of infatuation though the eyes of these fascinated boys who see them from across the street or in classrooms and school halls. An introductory sequence, where the girls, played respectively by Kirsten Dunst, A.J. Cook, Hanna Hall, Leslie Hayman, and Chelse Swain, are shown one-by-one with a glowing exuberance as they walk out the door of their house, sets the stage for the brightly-lit dreamlike reflections that follow.
This movie, adapted from a novel of the same name by Jeffrey Eugenides, divulges during its first moment that the five sisters died from suicide, but it never reveals the exact reasons why. Coppola's work is often rightly compared with Peter Weir's atmospheric 1975 Australian masterpiece,
Picnic at Hanging Rock, which tells of a schoolgirl who inexplicably goes missing while on a nature outing with her classmates, but never shares how or why she disappeared. I am also reminded of a superb novel,
Songs for the Missing, by Stewart O'Nan, which portrays the aftermath effects of a teen girl's disappearance on her family and her community. The point of
The Virgin Suicides lies not in the mystery itself, but in the way that the sisters are viewed as radiant enigmas by the boys and in the way that the deaths of the girls represent the inevitable demise of innocence and youth.
During one heartbreaking sequence, the male heartthrob of the entire school, Trip, played to excellence by Josh Hartnett, leaves Lux Lisbon, played by Kirsten Dunst, alone in a football field in the early morning hours after making love to her. The adult Trip, speaking directly to the camera, fondly recollects how much he liked Lux, but confides that, after he actually slept with her, things were different. The fantasy idealization of Lux in Trip's mind drives his pursuit of her, but the reality of actual intimacy and of tangible relationship responsibilities to a boy who is too young to process heavy drama leads him to walk away after the fact, leaving Lux to call a taxicab to take her home to her worried parents. For Trip, the longing for Lux was the attraction.
One could consider the title of
The Virgin Suicides according to the original meaning of the word, “virgin”, as an “independent unmarried woman”, as opposed its subsequent definition as a “chaste untouched woman” that has been imposed by apparent patriarchal intent in subsequent centuries. (This is fun trivia to share with your family over Christmas dinner.) There is an undeniably sad resonance, however, if one considers the conventional contemporary implication of the word in context to this film's title. The male narrators will never know why the Lisbon girls died from suicide, but the deaths of the sisters linger in their minds on as a tragic loss of the purity inherent in childhood longing and in wide-eyed dreams. The reasons for the suicides are inconsequential here, but their aftermath ushers in the jaded advent of adulthood for the boys across the street.
Years ago, a lifelong friend of mine, whom I had known since elementary school and with whom I had attended college before we went our separate ways as grown-ups, unexpectedly died from suicide. When I returned to my hometown for the memorial service and was reunited beforehand, under the unfortunate circumstances, with other high school friends, one of them fondly reminisced to me about how she and her friends would go walking carefree along the streets of the town square, but then lamented that she now does not allow her own daughters to walk alone in town, because,
“it is not the same anymore.” The shadow of that phrase hung over me during the funeral service. I will never know why my friend took his own life, but I did know that things would never be the same again.
This film, by way of Coppola's wistful daytime magic-hour camera perspectives of suburban streets, transports us to those fleeting times when our adolescent selves believed that things would always be the same. It is fittingly serendipitous that the dreamy score is composed by the French duo, Air, because those times in the past were more ephemeral and weightless than our younger selves could ever imagine.
The opening credits of
The Virgin Suicides pan up to the sky above the suburban streets to show a vision of Dunst's character winking directly at us. As Bruce Springsteen sings, those days will pass us by,
“in the wink of the young girl's eye.” Later on, the camera pans back up to show us an empty sky. Like youth itself, the Lisbon girls, along with the idealized longings that the neighborhood boys felt for them, are gone forever.
My technical evaluation of the
Criterion 4K UHD Blu-ray transfer is that it is a thing of beauty...that will thankfully stay with us forever.
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