The Virgin Suicides | |
---|---|
Directed by | Sofia Coppola |
Screenplay by | Sofia Coppola |
Based on | The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides |
Produced by |
|
Starring | |
Narrated by | Giovanni Ribisi |
Cinematography | Edward Lachman |
Edited by |
|
Music by | Air |
Production companies |
|
Distributed by | Paramount Classics [1] |
Release dates |
|
Running time | 97 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $6.1 million |
Box office | $10.4 million [1] |
The Virgin Suicides is a 1999 American psychological romantic drama film [2] written and directed by Sofia Coppola in her feature directorial debut, and co-produced by her father, Francis Ford Coppola. It stars James Woods, Kathleen Turner, Kirsten Dunst, A.J. Cook, and Josh Hartnett, with Scott Glenn, Michael Paré, Jonathan Tucker, and Danny DeVito in supporting roles.
The film is based on the 1993 debut novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. The film follows the lives of five adolescent sisters in an upper-middle-class suburb of Detroit during 1975.
Shot in 1998 in Toronto, it features an original score by the French electronic band Air. The film marked the first collaboration between Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst, whom Coppola later cast as the lead in several of her subsequent films.
The Virgin Suicides premiered at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival and received a limited theatrical release on April 21, 2000, in the United States, later expanding to a wide release in May 2000. The film earned largely positive reviews from critics, with the performances of the cast, Coppola's direction, visual style, and soundtrack receiving praise. It was also acclaimed for its lyrical representation of adolescent angst, and is recognized as a cult classic. [3]
In 2015, the film ranked number 39 on Entertainment Weekly 's list of the "50 Best High School Movies". [4]
In the sleepy suburb of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a group of neighborhood boys—now grown men—reflect upon their memories of the five Lisbon sisters, ages 13 to 17, in 1975. Unattainable due to their overprotective Catholic parents, math teacher Ronald Lisbon and his homemaker wife Sara, the girls—Therese, Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Cecilia—are enigmas who fill the boys' conversations and dreams.
During the summer, the youngest sister, Cecilia, slits her wrist in a bathtub, but survives. Her therapist, Dr. Horniker, suggests to her parents that Cecilia's suicide attempt was a cry for help, and she would benefit from wider interaction with her peers, particularly boys. Despite this, Mrs. Lisbon is unwilling to allow her daughters a normal social life. Mr. Lisbon persuades her to allow a chaperoned party to make Cecilia feel better. However, after other boys make fun of Joe, a teenager with Down syndrome, Cecilia excuses herself and commits suicide by leaping from her second-story bedroom window, impaling herself onto a spiked iron fencepost below. Afterwards, the Lisbon parents watch over their remaining daughters even more closely. This further isolates the family and heightens the air of mystery surrounding the girls, particularly to the neighborhood boys.
At the beginning of the new school year, Lux, the most rebellious sister, forms a secret, short-lived romance with Trip Fontaine, the school heartthrob. In hopes of becoming closer to Lux, Trip comes over to the Lisbon residence and watches television with the family. Trip persuades Mr. Lisbon to let him take Lux to the homecoming dance by promising to provide dates for Therese, Mary and Bonnie, and going as a group, to which Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon agree, with Mr. Lisbon chaperoning the dance. After winning homecoming King and Queen, Trip persuades Lux to ditch their group and take a walk on the football field, where they end up having sex. Afterwards, Lux falls asleep and Trip abandons her. At dawn, Lux wakes up alone and takes a taxi home, being met by her distraught parents.
Due to Lux breaking curfew, the girls are all punished. By using light signals and sharing records over the telephone, they share their feelings with the group of neighbor boys. Lux rebels and becomes overtly promiscuous, having anonymous sexual encounters on her house's roof late at night with random boys and men; the neighborhood boys spy from across the street. After months of confinement, the sisters begin to leave notes outside for the boys. The girls eventually send a final note asking the boys to come over at midnight, ostensibly to escape from their house.
When the boys finally arrive that night, they find Lux alone in the living room, smoking a cigarette. Thinking they are going to help the girls escape, the boys are invited inside by Lux to wait for her sisters, while she goes to start the car. Curious, the boys wander into the basement after hearing a noise and discover Bonnie's body hanging from the ceiling rafters. Horrified, the boys rush back upstairs, only to stumble across the body of Mary in the kitchen who put her head in the gas oven. The boys realize the girls killed themselves in an apparent suicide pact: Therese overdosed on sleeping pills upstairs, and Lux died of carbon monoxide poisoning by leaving the car engine running in the closed garage.
Devastated by the suicides of all their children, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon quietly flee the neighborhood and are never seen again. Mr. Lisbon has a friend clean out the house and sell the family belongings in a yard sale; family photos and other mementos are put out with the trash and collected by the boys. The house is eventually sold to a young couple from the Boston area.
Unsure of how to react to the events, the adults in the community go about their lives as if nothing traumatic happened, or even making fun of the suicides, but the boys cannot stop thinking about the Lisbon sisters and why they did what they did. Now adult men themselves, they acknowledge that they had loved the girls, and that the mystery surrounding their deaths will torment them for the rest of their lives.
Coppola wrote the script for the film in 1998 after the project was already greenlit at another studio, adapting it from the source novel, of which she was a fan. [5] Another script had already been written by Nick Gomez, but the production company that owned the rights at the time, Muse Productions, was dissatisfied with it. [6] After the rights to the novel lapsed, [5] Coppola pitched her manuscript to Muse executives Roberta and Chris Hanley, the latter of whom signed on to co-produce. [6] Coppola was inspired to write the film after reading the source novel: "I really didn't know I wanted to be a director until I read The Virgin Suicides and saw so clearly how it had to be done," she said. "I immediately saw the central story as being about what distance and time and memory do to you, and about the extraordinary power of the unfathomable." [7]
Kathleen Turner was the first actor to sign on to the project, playing the Lisbon girls' oppressive mother; Turner had known Coppola after they appeared together in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). [7] James Woods was cast opposite Turner as the passive father. Woods was given the script by Coppola's father, Francis, and was so impressed by the script and the character's "dark humor" that he agreed to play the role. [7] For the part of Lux, Coppola auditioned numerous actresses, but had a "gut choice" of Kirsten Dunst, who was sixteen years old at the time of her casting. [8] Reflecting on the role, Dunst said: "I was nervous. It was my first role that was more of a 'sexy' thing. I was also unsure about how large the role was gonna be, because a lot of it was without dialogue. When I met Sofia, I immediately knew that she would handle it in a delicate way... [she] really brought out the luminous aspect of the girls; she made them like ethereal angels, almost like they weren't really there." [9]
The Virgin Suicides was filmed in the summer of 1998 in Toronto, Ontario, standing in for suburban Detroit, Michigan, [8] on a reported budget of $6 million. [10] The shoot lasted roughly one month. [10]
Coppola was inspired by photographer Takashi Homma's photos of suburban Japan when choosing the filming locations; "I have always been struck by the beauty of banal details," she said, "and that is what suburban style is all about." [7] The film's occasional use of stills and collages was intended to evoke the "fantasia" of adolescence. [7] Cinematographer Edward Lachman shot the film. [7] Coppola's brother, Roman Coppola, was the second-unit director on the film. [10] The film was also visually inspired by Peter Weir’s 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock.
French electronic music duo Air composed the musical score for The Virgin Suicides. Coppola did not want the hits from the 1970s, but rather a "consistent soundtrack" that suited the theme of the film, which led Air to be on board. [7] She wanted to convey the theme of adolescence in the suburbs in the soundtrack. She found that Air shared many of her suburban memories and experiences even though they grew up in a different country. [7]
Air's score was released on February 23, 2000, by Virgin Records, to critical acclaim and has been considered as one of the "best film scores/rock albums". [11] [12] [13] The film features songs by 1970s-era performers and five tracks from the 1990s by Sloan. A separate soundtrack album was released on March 28, 2000, featuring music from Todd Rundgren, Boston, Heart, Sloan, The Hollies, Al Green, Gilbert O'Sullivan, 10cc, Styx, and two tracks by Air (one previously recorded; one composed for the film). [14] The deluxe edition of the film score was released in June 2015, [15] and a vinyl re-issue was published by Rhino Records in 2020. [16]
The film had its world premiere at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival on May 19. [5] It was given a limited release in the United States almost a year later on April 21, 2000. [17]
The theatrical release would expand to a wide release in May 2000. [18]
The film was released on VHS and DVD through Paramount Home Entertainment on December 19, 2000. [19] On April 24, 2018, a remastered version of the film was released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc via The Criterion Collection, featuring new interviews, a behind-the-scenes documentary, an essay, among other features. [20] [21] A 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray release from Criterion followed on July 5, 2022. [22]
The Virgin Suicides received positive reviews from film critics, though some noted the film's discomforting thematic material. [23] It holds an 80% approval rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 108 reviews, with a weighted average of 7.1/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "The Virgin Suicides drifts with a dreamlike melancholy that may strike some audiences as tedious, but Sofia Coppola's feature debut is a mature meditation on disaffected youth." [24] On Metacritic, the film holds a rating of 77 out of 100, based on 31 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". [25]
Jeffrey Eugenides visited the set of the film for three days. [7] He supported the film, but did offer a few critiques in an interview with Dazed. [7] Eugenides envisioned the girls as more of an entity than actual people; he believed this idea could have been accomplished by casting different actresses to play the same character with each actress changing depending on whom they are speaking to. [7]
Graham Fuller of The New York Times gave the film a middling review, writing: "Ms. Coppola has made [...] a haunting metaphysical celebration of adolescence with the aura of a myth. Yet, on the surface, there is something wrong with this picture: how can a film in which a quintet of apparently normal girls commit suicide possibly be a celebration, and why would a filmmaker attempt to make it so unless she is uncommonly perverse?" [26] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times gave the film a positive review, praising Coppola's direction, the cast, and the production design, but also noting that while the film "is successfully venturesome... you need to know that it's also a real downer." [27] Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars, and positively compared it to Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975): "[Coppola] has the courage to play it in a minor key," he notes. "She doesn't hammer home ideas and interpretations. She is content with the air of mystery and loss that hangs in the air like bitter poignancy." [28]
Ed Gonzalez of Slant Magazine noted the film's dreamy, childlike nature, writing: "The narrator speaks of youth as if it existed and still exists in a near-fugue state. In this respect, the film is as much a relevant view of adolescence and male/female relations as it is an act of remembrance. Scenes from the film (first kisses, gossiping about neighbors) are sinewy in nature and seem lifted from the pages of a lost photo album." [29] Critic Richard Crouse called the film "one of those rare occasions when a film surpasses the book it is based on," and included it in his book The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen (2003). [30]
Award | Date of ceremony | Category | Recipient(s) | Result | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Brit Awards | February 26, 2001 | Soundtrack/Cast Recording | Air | Nominated | [31] |
Cannes Film Festival | May 23, 1999 | Caméra d'Or | Sofia Coppola | Nominated | [32] |
C.I.C.A.E. Award | The Virgin Suicides | Nominated | |||
Casting Society of America | November 1, 2000 | Independent Feature Film Casting | Linda Phillips Palo, Robert McGee | Won | [33] |
Chicago Film Critics Association | February 26, 2001 | Best Original Score | Air | Nominated | [34] |
Las Vegas Film Critics Society | December 21, 2000 | Best Director | Sofia Coppola | Nominated | [35] |
Best Adapted Screenplay | Nominated | ||||
Best Supporting Actor | James Woods | Nominated | |||
Best Cinematography | Edward Lachman | Nominated | |||
Best Female Newcomer | Sofia Coppola | Nominated | |||
MTV Movie Awards | June 2, 2001 | Best New Filmmaker | Won | [36] | |
Teen Choice Awards | August 6, 2000 | Choice Movie Actress | Kirsten Dunst | Nominated | [37] |
Young Hollywood Awards | April 29, 2001 | Best Director | Sofia Coppola | Won | |
YoungStar Awards | November 19, 2000 | Best Young Actress in a Drama Film | Kirsten Dunst | Nominated | [38] |
Empire Awards | February 19, 2001 | Best Debut | Sofia Coppola | Nominated | [39] |
Chlotrudis Awards | 2001 | Best Adapted Screenplay | Nominated | [40] | |
Cahiers du Cinéma | 2000 | Top 10 Film Award | The Virgin Suicides | 7th Place | [41] |
Kirsten Caroline Dunst is an American actress. She made her acting debut in the anthology film New York Stories (1989) and has since starred in several film and television productions. She has received several awards including nominations for an Academy Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and four Golden Globe Awards.
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American author. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: The Virgin Suicides (1993), Middlesex (2002), and The Marriage Plot (2011). The Virgin Suicides served as the basis of the 1999 film of the same name, while Middlesex received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis.
The Virgin Suicides is a coming-of-age thriller novel and the debut novel by American writer Jeffrey Eugenides, published in 1993. The story, which is set in Grosse Pointe, Michigan during the 1970s, centers on the lives of five doomed sisters, the Lisbon girls. The novel is written in first person plural from the perspective of an anonymous group of teenage boys who struggle to find an explanation for the Lisbons' deaths. The novel's first chapter appeared in The Paris Review in 1990, and won the 1991 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. The novel was adapted into a 1999 movie by director Sofia Coppola, starring Kirsten Dunst.
Sofia Carmina Coppola is an American filmmaker and former actress. She has won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Golden Lion, and a Cannes Film Festival Award. She was also nominated for three BAFTA Awards, as well as a Primetime Emmy Award.
Lost in Translation is a 2003 romantic comedy-drama film written and directed by Sofia Coppola. Bill Murray stars as Bob Harris, a fading American movie star who is having a midlife crisis when he travels to Tokyo to promote Suntory whisky. There, he befriends another estranged American named Charlotte, a young woman and recent college graduate. Giovanni Ribisi, Anna Faris, and Fumihiro Hayashi are also featured. The film explores themes of alienation and disconnection against a backdrop of cultural displacement in Japan. It defies mainstream narrative conventions and is atypical in its depiction of romance.
Hanna Rose Hall is an American actress. She made her film debut in Forrest Gump (1994), and later appeared in Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides (1999) and Rob Zombie's Halloween (2007).
Elizabethtown is a 2005 American romantic tragicomedy film written and directed by Cameron Crowe and distributed by Paramount Pictures. Its story follows a young shoe designer, Drew Baylor, who is fired from his job after costing his company an industry record of nearly one billion dollars. On the verge of suicide, Drew receives a call from his sister telling him that their father has died while visiting their former hometown of Elizabethtown, Kentucky. Deciding to postpone his suicide and bring their father's body back to Oregon, he then becomes involved in an unexpected romance with Claire Colburn, whom he meets near the start of his journey. Elizabethtown stars Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Alec Baldwin, and Susan Sarandon.
Crazy/Beautiful is a 2001 American teen romantic drama film starring Kirsten Dunst and Jay Hernandez. It is largely set at Palisades Charter High School and the surrounding area, including Downtown Los Angeles, Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and East Los Angeles.
Marie Antoinette is a 2006 historical drama film written, directed, and produced by Sofia Coppola. Based on the 2001 biography Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser, the film covers the life of Marie Antoinette, played by Kirsten Dunst, in the years leading to the French Revolution.
Lick the Star is a 14-minute-long black and white 16mm short film, and the first film written and directed by Sofia Coppola.
The Virgin Suicides (Music from the Motion Picture) is the soundtrack accompanying the 1999 debut feature film by director Sofia Coppola. Released by Emperor Norton Records on March 28, 2000, the album features classic rock and pop songs by Todd Rundgren, Heart, Sloan, The Hollies, Al Green, Gilbert O'Sullivan, 10cc and Styx; plus two tracks from the French electronic music duo Air.
Somewhere is a 2010 drama film written and directed by Sofia Coppola. The film follows Johnny Marco, a newly famous actor, as he recuperates from a minor injury at the Chateau Marmont, a well-known Hollywood retreat. Despite money, fame and professional success, Marco is trapped in an existential crisis and has an emotionally empty daily life. When his ex-wife suffers an unexplained breakdown and goes away, she leaves Cleo, their 11-year-old daughter, in his care. They spend time together and her presence helps Marco mature and accept adult responsibility. The film explores ennui among Hollywood stars, the father–daughter relationship and offers an oblique comedy of show business, particularly Hollywood filmmaking and the life of a "star".
The Bling Ring is a 2013 crime film written and directed by Sofia Coppola featuring an ensemble cast led by Emma Watson, Katie Chang, Israel Broussard, Taissa Farmiga, Claire Julien, Georgia Rock and Leslie Mann. It is based on the 2010 Vanity Fair article "The Suspects Wore Louboutins" by Nancy Jo Sales, which dealt with a real-life gang known as the Bling Ring. The story follows a group of fame-obsessed teenagers who use the internet to track celebrities' whereabouts in order to burgle their homes.
Gian-Carla Coppola is an American film director and screenwriter. She made her directorial feature film debut with Palo Alto in 2013. A member of the Coppola family, she is the granddaughter of director Francis Ford Coppola and niece of Sofia Coppola.
Oona Laurence is an American actress. She is best known for the role of Matilda Wormwood in Matilda on Broadway alongside Bailey Ryon, Milly Shapiro, and Sophia Gennusa. She began her career as a New York City-based child actress, with credits in film, theatre, and television.
Woodshock is a 2017 American psychological thriller drama film written and directed by Kate and Laura Mulleavy, in their joint feature directorial debut. It stars Kirsten Dunst, Joe Cole, and Pilou Asbæk. The plot follows a woman who, reeling after the loss of her mother, begins to cope by using a powerful substance which has hallucinogenic, violent repercussions.
The Beguiled is a 2017 American Southern Gothic thriller film written and directed by Sofia Coppola, based on the 1966 novel by Thomas P. Cullinan. It stars Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, and Elle Fanning. It is the second film adaptation of Cullinan's novel, following Don Siegel's 1971 film.
Mary Jane "MJ" Watson is a fictional character in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man film series. Based on the character of the same name, she is portrayed by Kirsten Dunst. In the films, Mary Jane is Peter Parker's next-door neighbor, childhood crush, and primary love interest. Though Mary Jane dates several other men in the first two films, she ultimately falls in love with Peter and Spider-Man and discovers they are one and the same. Despite his strong feelings for her, Peter initially declines a relationship with her in order to keep her safe, but they eventually become a couple in the end.
Priscilla is a 2023 American biographical drama film written, directed, and produced by Sofia Coppola, based on the 1985 memoir Elvis and Me by Priscilla Presley and Sandra Harmon. It follows the life of Priscilla and her complicated romantic relationship with Elvis Presley.