In a suburban neighborhood in the mids, all five teenage girls in the Lisbon family die by suicide, forever changing the lives of the boys who lived nearby.
Sofia Coppola's film "The Virgin Suicides" is tragic and isn't always easy to watch, but it's a beautiful and eerie dive into the secret lives of teen girls , the reach of grief, and the malleability of memory. The film was Coppola's directorial debut and she wrote the screenplay as well, based on the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. Later it found cult status on home video, joining the Criterion Collection in It's a deeply challenging film because the impending deaths of the girls loom over every scene β in a way, we know the ending before the first frame even plays.
Instead of delivering a standard narrative and all of the terrible, graphic details like tawdry true crime, Coppola took a page from the source material and made the narrators unreliable, their depiction of events tainted by their own perspectives. Because the story is told through the framework of memory, it's often dreamlike and can be a bit confusing, especially when it comes to the film's shocking conclusion. Let's look a little deeper at "The Virgin Suicides" to explain what all of the odd moments, metaphors, and that ending all really mean.
After a suicide attempt by the youngest Lisbon sister, Cecilia Hanna R. Hall , doctors recommend that the girls be given some kind of social life outside of school. Private school math teacher Ronald Lisbon James Woods and his extremely devout Catholic wife Sara Kathleen Turner are hesitant to let the girls interact with the world at all and have sheltered them to extremes, but they relent. They throw a party for Cecilia and invite boys and girls from the neighborhood, but Cecilia leaves and dies by suicide.
(mh=bUacpEKor_vnozHj)0.jpg "Sluts in Lisbon")
Her death has a profound impact on the family but they try to keep going in the face of their grief. After Cecilia's death, the neighborhood boys start collecting items that the Lisbon girls once owned, starting with Cecilia's diary.
