Directed by Sofia Coppola
American Zoetrope
On general release worldwide
Rating: 3/4

Adolescent angst, crazy psychiatrists, blood in the bath, religious repression, flares, and silly haircuts. This beautifully filmed novel about the suicides of five teenage sisters in 1970s Michigan, made by the Coppola family, fails to miss a cliché while also providing a poignant insight into suicide in young people.

Told as a verbal jigsaw puzzle by clueless adolescent lads trying to understand the horror that happened next door, the film skillfully contrasts the incomprehensibility of the girls' suicides to outsiders with an insightful portrayal of the personal powerlessness of young women in religious America.

Voyeurism is a prominent theme. The voyeurism of the lads next door echoes that of the curtain twitching, small town community, watching over coffee as the family drifts into madness and death. Nobody lifts anything more than a martini glass to save the girls, illustrating the power of the educated middle class over their children - the same scenario in a working class family would have undoubtedly resulted in attempts to save the girls.

There is a clear failure of the helping systems to come to the aid of the sisters - Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Theresa, and Mary. "You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets," Cecilia is told by the hospital doctor after her first suicide attempt. Her apt response - You've never been a 13 year old girl" - clearly challenges us to try to understand her act as a logical result of the choices open to her. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most unsympathetic character is Cecilia's psychiatrist, overplayed in stereotypically crazy style by Danny de Vito. It seems impossible for films to avoid showing psychiatrists as either crazy, punitive, or superhumanly insightful.

The girls are very clearly not depressed, apart from the youngest, Cecilia. The others just drift away from a life they had never been allowed to fully share because of their parents' religious and personal anxieties. Their suicides are acts of anger, loudly shouted as the only apparent option open to them within their view of the world.

The characters in the film are well drawn, particularly the adolescents, saturated with sexual awakening, insecurity, and idealism. Kathleen Turner and James Wood provide superbly ordinary parents who just get it wrong in balancing affection and control, before dissociating into madness towards the end. The cliché of religious repression is unavoidable, but neatly tacit, with the film set in the American north, not the south, and the family being Catholic rather than hell raising Protestant.

Like the recent Oscar winning film American Beauty, The Virgin Suicides challenges us to examine the consequences of traditional versions of love and family life. "They never lacked for love" was their mother's only response, highlighting the danger of narrowly defined versions of affection, responsibility, and acceptable behaviour.