The Virgin Suicides is a perverted movie, and I mean deviant, not dirty. Everything about it is a little bit lopsided--crazy James Woods is cast as a kept father, for instance. But its director, Sofia Coppola, doesn't play it as pop kink; instead, she strives for the reverie quality of David Lynch at his most suburban, which makes everything that's by principle out of the ordinary seem in tune, unexotic, even. A fractured nostalgia piece, watching The Virgin Suicides is like trying to deduce the story of someone's life from a box of snapshots--it's a wispy yet challenging experience, and it stumbles upon a few great images and many more lasting ones.

Narrator Giovanni Ribisi is almost the disembodied equivalent of Citizen Kane 's investigative reporter, determined to unravel not the circumstances surrounding but the meaning behind the death of five fair-haired teenaged sisters. Unlike Kane's Thompson, the (unnamed, as with almost all of The Virgin Suicides ' males) Ribisi character knew them--not well, no one did--and grew up in their neighbourhood; he has spent a lifetime, as opposed to a couple of weeks, reflecting on their collective demise. (Ultimately, why the smothered Lisbon siblings killed themselves is not an Agatha Christie mystery; the narrator assuages his insecure regret by feigning inquest.) In the opening sequence, he relates Cecilia Lisbon, the youngest sister and the earliest to die. She has just slit her wrists but survives this first suicide attempt, and when a doctor lectures her in earnest, she looks him deadeye. "Obviously," she says, "You've never been a thirteen year old girl."

From there, we meet the others, played by Hannah Hall, Chelse Swain, A. J. Cook, Leslie Hayman, and (*sigh*) Kirsten Dunst. Their character names are equally inconsequential, as they essentially comprise a singular oppressed identity, a blonde sacrificial lamb. Coppola only stresses the designation of Dunst's alter ego, Lux, and that's appropriate: "Lux" implies luminosity, and she is the Lisbon who glows. It is Lux the boys across the street spy on in the wee hours, as if she is the Lisbon house's sole source of light at night. When Lux is shamed, as when her heart is broken by callous gigolo Trip Fontaine (a swell Josh Hartnett), or when her devout mother forces her to set alight her collection of rock 'n' roll records (the story takes place in the mid-nineteen-seventies, I should add here), the neighbourhood gets darker.

Coppola marches to the same austere drummer that her father, Francis Ford Coppola, did in such films as Apocalypse Now and Bram Stoker's Dracula , but she resists his impulse to overproduce lyricism. She certainly shows more organized promise than he did in his thesis effort, You're a Big Boy Now; all the same, The Virgin Suicides feels a work of isolated passion--intense dabbling, if you will--and not the herald of a new cinematic life force. As for the film's dreaminess, it of course undermines tangibility; when we try to latch on to a moment in The Virgin Suicides, it usually eludes us, or just escapes our grip. (On a literal level, it's appropriate that Coppola chose the French band "Air" to score the picture.) Its beauty, like that of the Lisbon sisters, is untouchable but incontrovertible.

Paramount's DVD release of The Virgin Suicides preserves the filtered autumn delicacy of Ed Lachman's cinematography. He and Coppola forge a convincing period atmosphere that matches, at times, those gauzy coming-of-age flicks of the seventies. The transfer is letterboxed at 1.85:1 and enhanced for 16x9 displays. Audio is Dolby Digital 5.1, though it rarely identifies itself as such, except during a homecoming sequence; Air's selections, too, are noteworthy for their implacability--the instruments sound as if they're emanating from us. Extras include: a halting, 23-minute video diary of the production shot by Coppola's mother Eleanor (acclaimed author of Notes) that Sofia recently admitted in an interview probably won't appeal to many outside of her family; the bizarre clip for Air's "Playground Love" (chewing gum stands in for the lead singer!); the theatrical trailer; and a nice photo gallery that gives the impression of a yearbook.



Recommended: Yes