The Virgin Suicides movie review- The original Suicide Squad

 When your circle is small but you're all suicidal <3

Director: Sofia Coppola

Writer: Sofia Coppola, Jeffrey Eugenides

Cinematographer: Edward Lachman

Cast: Kirsten Dunst, James Woods, Kathleen Turner, Josh Hartnett, Danny DeVito

Year: 1999

In a suburban home, on a white picket-fenced street, in the middle of 1970s America lived the five Lisbon sisters. Sheltered by their strict and reclusive religious parents (the amazing James Woods and Kathleen Turner), their doomed fates marked the neighbourhood boys who become obsessed with them, especially Lux (the wonderful Kirsten Dunst). As impenetrable youth shows the life-altering secrets of American adolescence. 

The Virgin Suicides is a fascinating and thought-provoking critique of the way men look at women, painting these young girls as perfect human beings through cinematography that relies entirely on the male gaze. The young boys perpetuate them so far into angelification that these young girls are no longer seen as really human but as martyrs and sexual temptresses as they blind them with their beauty. Even in their misery and turmoil, we must see them only as whispy feminine ideals, romanticised to such an extent that even the spectator begins to do so. Fetishized not only by the boys but also by their parents, the girls must stay holy and virginal. As adults speculate about the causes, clinging motives on the interior decoration or projecting their own worldly view onto it, parasitic new journalists sensationalise their deaths for public consumption, extending it as far as it can even to us as the spectators. It comes to show that these young girls are always subjected to someone else's gaze and judgement. Teenage girlhood really is agony incarnate; whilst your body is seen as an adult's, your feelings, dreams, thoughts, and frustrations are seen of a child, a naive child. It is the imprisonment of being a girl. Melancholy doesn't just flood the screen; it permeates and lingers deeply embedded with the cotton of the girl's prom dresses and in the living room wallpaper. The Virgin Suicides is not a glorification or glamourisation of suicide; although it does visually try and romanticise the girls' lives, their untimely deaths are dark and morbid and are left lingering in vagueness. Boys love the idea of girls over the actual girls themselves up until their deaths and then in death, and after death, they still seem to love the idea. The Virgin Suicides is a story about women narrated by a man, or more precisely, it is a story about a girl told by a boy. R.I.P the Lisbon sisters; they would have loved Lana Del Rey. Also, Lux Lisbon was the blueprint. I've seen the thousand upon thousand edits of this film, the multiple over-used screen grabs littered around social media; I had become so used to the images of the films that I felt as if I had already watched it. Many argue that "literature doesn't translate to the screen", as The Virgin Suicides was previously a book written by Jeffrey Eugenides, but I feel that Coppola's attempt at a faithful adaptation is a hazy love-spilled dream of a film and having read the book myself I can say that its translation onto the silver screen is hallucinatingly beautiful. The Virgin Suicides is tender and atmospheric; it is lacking a little in some cohesive character development which was in the book but is it so bad that this film is more for the style than substance? I think not. The Virgin Suicides is a poetic, tragic and enigmatic coming-of-age film with an excellent portrayal of the 1970s Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and to think this was a directorial debut! Sofia Coppola really makes the best movies about depressed white women, I'm so shocked I had waited this long to finally watch this film, and now I'm about to make it my whole entire personality. Bitches say they're fine and then watch The Virgin suicides...I'm bitches. 

I find so much comfort in watching this despite how sad it is. Glad to see that the mentally ill bitches are getting the representation they deserve.  Air's soundtrack has got to be in my top 5 list of best movie scores, it seemed to just capture the dream-like quality of the suburbs and the girls whilst also having the ability to flesh out the darkness of the girl's deaths, of the young pre-pubescent boys and the death of 1970s America. Sofia Coppola really has an impeccable music taste! No one can capture aimless teenage angst like Sofia Coppola and Air. It's a listen to "playground love" and cry myself to sleep type of night. The score is just so perfect! I need it playing at my funeral! Kirsten Dunst also made this film her bitch; I mean, her performance was so tragically heartbreaking to watch; there are just so many sides to her character and to her surroundings, and I felt so submerged in the film by her. Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst are Hollywood's most powerful duo; prove me wrong. I feel like if Lana Del Rey's music existed in the 70s, we could have avoided all of this.  Oh, to live rent-free in someone's mind the way the Lisbon sisters live in those boys' minds. Also, fuck Trip Fontaine, but also, I want to fuck Trip Fontaine; your days are numbered, buddy. We need to bring back 70s men, and then I'll finally be happy. Trip Fontaine will forever be my white boy of the month <3 The magic man sequence is literally art; someone needs to go frame that in the louvre, fuck the Mona Lisa; I need that shit on the wall instead. The sensual dreams and half-baked memories of innocence and beauty overwhelm this picture; stuck in a poetic state of existence, the girls change slowly until their memories morph and finally fade until they are left as spectres haunting the neighbourhood and the boys who are now men. No one will ever truly understand why they did it, sometimes, there is no explanation or a reason as to why they did what they did, so instead, the boys focus on what they became instead of focusing on who they really were. The past cannot be changed.  Untouchable by man and meant to be, instead, imbued by women ethereally. The Virgin Suicides focuses on suburbia's fallen angels, a universe of feminity on the edge of the window, ready to jump. I mean, I, too, would kill myself if my mum tried to burn my record collection. 

The Virgin Suicides is just perfectly haunting and captivatingly beautiful.  I somehow feel very warm and very empty whenever I watch this. When I say I'm going to kill myself in front of someone to change the trajectory of their lives forever, this is what I mean.

Rating: 4.5/5

Favourite quotes: 

"What we have here is a dreamer. Someone completely out of touch with reality." 

"It didn't matter in the end how old they've been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them."

"That girl didn't want to die. She just wanted out of that house. She wanted out of that decorating scheme." 

"When she jumped, she probably thought she could fly."