The Virgin Suicides - fetishising suicide for male fantasy?

its not actually saying anything about the relationship between men and women other than that females should be untouchable deities who are sullied both by ageing and/or actual acquaintance. every girl should be a walking model of The Princess Complex. and, to an extent, female sexuality is ultimately destructive.

that said, i'm not entirely without sympathy for either the book or Sofia Coppola's film. and the film has kirsten dunst in it!

um..

You mean they're not?

*cries*

YOU HAVE SHATTERED MY CRYSTAL PALACE.

(I think Mark may be bitter that I pointed out that Danny DeVito in VS = him in ~20 years)

the book seems far too sincere for any of that crap.

In any case, I think the ending was appropriate. Any parent that controlling as their mother was, is way overbearing.

I didn't think it was a male fantasy-ish movie..but then again I'm not a male so I can't say truthfully. To me it was more of a telling-it-how-it-half-is type movie. Females are in control most of the time in relationships, the mom usually wears the pants (if you understand what I mean) in the relationships, and a lot of the time logic can't be seen visibly in the decisions that are made. Good example: my decisions are nonsequitor, and it bothers the hell out of my guyfriends.

A common suicide fantasy is imagining how people react when you die - and how much more loved the first suicidal daughter was after she had died would have played into those fantasies. That said necessarily the film treats the girls pretty much as closed books. I think the boy side of the film is less convincing, though I do take the point about the unknowability of the girls.

Am I the only one who thought the latter day interview of Dunst's boyfriend in an institution really broke the flow of the movie?

hated LOST IN TRANSLATION, but what's the half-decade-on consensus on this?

it's better than LIT (also more than five years old... more like nine, i think).

I've watched this at least a dozen times over the past 6 months, it's turned into one of my favorite movies. It's such a great mood piece, so evenly toned. Marie Antionette was similar in a lot of ways but not as good, I think because Air's soundtrack was the glue that held VS together. All the greens and yellows and browns are spectacular.

Also Josh Hartnett was so perfect as Trip Fontaine. That character intro sequence!

no i jus meant like half a decade since we last waffled about it is all.

i wrote a little bit about it (in here), so i'll just, uh, quote myself...

The five Lisbon sisters are ciphers in Eugenides’ book, beautiful, unknowable, and unattainable. Coppola accepts the unsolvable puzzles of their family and, eventually, their deaths. But, probably for the obvious reason that she was a teenage girl herself, she gets inside the girls’ world more than Eugenides did. Their glances and giggles feel like a conspiracy that the movie is in on, in a way the book was not. In contrast, the neighborhood boys who observe and document the girls’ story are barely characterized beyond the needs of narrative function.
Not that “narrative” per se is the movie’s strength, or Coppola’s. She specializes in atmosphere, conveying ideas through a combination of beguiling images, gliding camerawork and artfully deployed music. Her films feel designed as much as directed, which is not intended as a slur. She has a fashion photographer’s eye for composition and suggestion (not a surprise, given her background as both an occasional model and a clothing designer), and a striking sense of the use of light. She is in many ways an experimental filmmaker, but because she draws partly on the effects and vocabulary of commercial photography and music video, it is easy to confuse her means with her ends. As a director, she shows some obvious debt to Wong Kar-wai, particularly the longing romanticism of movies like Happy Together and In the Mood for Love. The deceptive narrative neutrality of Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette also has something in common with the recent films of Gus van Sant, Elephant and Last Days, which observe their characters’ troubling actions with a blank stare. But Coppola’s style, for all its coolness, is less clinical than van Sant’s, and not as lush as Wong’s. Her movies have a kinetic buzz that sets them apart, even in their missteps.

...An early scene shows city workers tagging blighted trees for removal, establishing a sense of creeping malignancy in the heart of the apparently safe, friendly neighborhood. (The Lisbon sisters’ final public act is an unsuccessful attempt to save the tree in their yard.) Fortunately, Coppola doesn’t push this theme too far; the story is not just another exposé of suburban decay. It is about fear and alienation — the mother’s phobia of the world, the daughters’ isolation from it — and also about the age-old conflict between the idealization of the feminine and the urge to dominate and degrade it.

"But, probably for the obvious reason that she was a teenage girl herself, she gets inside the girls’ world more than Eugenides did"

But, you know, it's not like Eugenides tries and fails. For my money, the book was much better than the film, at least partly because the Lisbon sisters work much better when dimly perceived and hazily remembered.

well it's just a matter of different perspectives. the book is clearly from the boys' point of view so of course the girls are more distant. the movie is still narratively from the boys' point of view, but the boys are observed through coppola's lens, so the movie is more... on the inside, looking out at the boys looking in.

anyway i think it's a good little movie.

The thing I really like about the book is that it is told from the boys' point of view, the first person plural. The girls are a mystery, but the boys are also amorphous and undefined.

Still Sofia's best movie.

One of the homecoming dates is Anakin Skywalker.

And James Woods is really good as the clueless, increasingly unhinged dad.

Agree it's her best. But then it's been diminishing returns from what I've seen (everything up to the Dorff one)

yep 100%, that's when i quit too.

The Criterion edition interviews are really good.

Definitely her best

That means you’ve missed both Bling Ring and The Beguiled! xps Both of which I liked.

Anyway I watched this for the first time last month and liked it too. I love the Dunst so much.

I only think of this film as a soundtrack

I liked the Bling Ring fine. I didn't see the Beguiled after all the PC whitewashing backlash but maybe it's still good, I should watch it before judging frankly.

I really like the Dorff movie (Somewhere).

Somewhere felt like such a whole lot of nothing to me that it scared me off Coppola long enough that I didn't even bother with The Bling Ring (I'll catch up with it eventually). I thought her version of The Beguiled was a lovely bore, probably due to the whitewashing--the Don Siegel film is no masterpiece, but it sure is thorny.

All of that said, her first three films remain as impressive a cinematic hat-trick as any that I can remember in my moviegoing lifetime.

As my sister said when I brought up the controversy of Coppola's Beguiled eliminating the enslaved characters from the original (which I haven't seen), "do you really want her trying to handle that?" Which I thought was fair. Certainly it's something of a failure to not be able to address race in your movie set in the danged Civil War South, but a better failure than trying and doing a bad job, in 2017.

Anyway I hope her next movie includes some of the weird stuff The Virgin Suicides has, like the vignetting, talking heads, anonymous cutaway characters, that bravura shit.

depends if Jeffrey Eugenides has another book?

Somewhere felt like such a whole lot of nothing to me

otm. I just couldn't find anything, anywhere in that movie

Eugenedies has like three or four other books, at least oneof them is amazing (middlesex) but she'd be the wrong director to adapt it