The Virgin Suicides By Sofia Coppola

Sofia Coppola is a visually stylish filmmaker. A penchant for aesthetically pleasing fashion, photography, and art has largely contributed to her oeuvre. Beauty is self-conscious throughout her work with sensuality becoming an all-important part of the viewing process. The numerous pastels, fluid camerawork, and contemporary soundtracks have often been dubbed as the Coppola “Dreamscape.” On the surface, these “dreamscapes” are incredibly inviting. Viewers are forced to feel instead of watching in passivity. These seductive audio-video elements have led some to question whether there is actually any true thematic substance to her work. Alongside the aesthetic nature of her films, Coppola often raises questions of existential crisis within the …show more content…
The classic coming of age trope has been done time and time again in various films, but it usually centers on a male character. Coppola breaks this trend by focusing on a girl’s journey from adolescence to adulthood. It should be noted though that The Virgin Suicides is as much about the boy’s journeys as the girl’s. A common misconception is that the film focuses on the motives for why the Lisbon girls committed suicide. The film is named after their fate, but it is ultimately about growing older and the shifting of perspectives of an idealistic child to an adult living in reality. At the beginning of the film, it seems the four boys share a collective love for the Lisbon sisters. It becomes apparent throughout that their infatuation was actually quite shallow. They romanticize the sisters through their fragmented understanding of them and the personal objects of theirs that they collect. Trip Fontaine (Josh Harnett) is the only character in the film that follows this romanticized ideal to its end. He believes that he is in love with Lux Lisbon because she remains to be this great, unattainable mystery. After he has sex with her, he does not feel the same. This ideal of Lux Lisbon fades away and she awakens in the cool-blue morning by herself in isolation. Trip realizes that his love for Lux was simply lust. The story of Trip serves a duality with the story of the four boys. The boys are never allowed to …show more content…
Her stylistic “dreamscape” is fully realized within this first film as well as the thematic tropes she would continue to explore throughout her oeuvre. There are distinctions between idealism, youth, and reality at play within the film, and it is only through the tragedy of suicide that these ideas come to light. Coppola wants to probe the mind with her stylistic approach. She asks the viewer to look below what is happening at the surface level of the film, because what lies beneath the façade is something that is wrapped in