Film review: The Virgin Suicides
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.
Five sisters failed by the system (PATHE)
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.
Russell Viner, consultant in adolescent medicine and endocrinology, University College and Great Ormond Street Hospitals, London
studentBMJ 2000;08:217-258 July ISSN 0966-6494
