The Virgin Suicides directed by Sophie Coppola - Film Review

This film sees the directorial feature length debut for Sophie Coppola. The film was adapted from the 1993 novel of the same name by Jeffrey Eugendies. The story is told through narration from a present tense perspective in which we follow the lives of a group of boys and their memories of a family of 5 sisters, who over the duration of the film each commit suicide.

In this the majority of the action takes place in the past. Throughout the film we are presented memories of the girls, interviews with the boys as adults and our present-day narrators views on the events with hindsight unknown to us. 

The audience and the narrator himself try to examine the evidence in a way to help understand what caused these events to unfold, although we are never really presented with enough information to come up with a conclusive answer to our questions. With this, the narrator comes to the conclusion that even now as an adult he still finds himself examining those past events from his childhood.

But the film itself does not focus on the suicides, instead choosing to concentrate on the lives of the girls. The narrator character tries to first to focus on the sisters as the people they were, but he is unable to do this. Instead what he does is analyze them as subjects. He unintentionally objectifies them viewing them in an idolized manner, in the way that he did as a teenage boy.

Yet this is what many of us would do in the understanding that a group of people that we were close to had committed suicide. He questions what would make his friends want to commit such acts. Examining previous times and events of which they spent together. However with him unable to come to any conclusive understanding of how these events came to pass, he instead focuses on the good times that they shared together. Remembering them in their happiest moments as opposed to their darkest hours.