THE VIRGIN SUICIDES

A film by Sofia Coppola

When Cecilia Lisbon (Hanna Hall) ends up in hospital after her first serious suicide attempt - by slashing her wrists in the bathtub - a gruffly inadequate doctor tells her she isn't even old enough to know how bad life gets. "Obviously, doctor, you've never been a 13-year-old girl," she replies.

Sophia Coppola has - as is keenly evident in The Virgin Suicides, her bold and remarkably accomplished feature-film debut.
The first-time writer-director treats the intense, emotional roller coaster ride that is adolescence with healthy respect and a sharp, knowing eye for detail. The Lisbon sisters might be dream creatures but Coppola is as interested in their reality as Freud might have been, though she comes at it from a markedly different perspective.

The Virgin Suicides is the story of five beautiful blonde sisters who live in a Brady Bunch-style house in a tree-lined street the middle of 1970s America, as recounted by their bewitched, bothered and bewildered boy neighbours, who are still trying to make some sense of events many years later.

Based on Jeffrey Eugenides' book, it's part mockumentary, part teen romance and part unsolved mystery.  

By the end of the film, we know the girls have entered into some kind of surreal suicide pact, but we don't really know why (okay, so their overprotective mum has grounded them for what looks like eternity, but surely that's grounds for rebellion rather than self-annihilation).

Like the doomed schoolgirls in Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Lisbon sisters are responding to some otherworldly call that grown-ups simply can't hear.

That would make Kirsten Dunst's Lux, the most confident, extroverted and sexually adventurous of the five girls, the 20th-century version of Miranda. And the 16-year-old actress (Drop Dead Gorgeous) is as equally compelling a character, though she inhabits a more stylised, suburban landscape.

In Virgin Suicides, there are also plenty of boys -- from the ones next door, who spy on the unattainable beauties through gauze curtains, to high school hunk Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett), a velvet-suited charmer who becomes smitten with Lux.

When Trip does the unthinkable (asking Lux out on a date) and pulls off the unimaginable (he and his mates accompany all four remaining sisters to the school prom) events spiral out of control.

An almost unrecognisably frumpy Kathleen Turner plays the girls' fanatical, over-protective mother. And James Woods, also cast against type, is their nerdy, maths teacher father.

A post-modern fairytale with a surprisingly tender heart that should silence the skeptics for good (yes, Sophia is Francis Ford's daughter and Spike Jonze's wife, but The Virgin Suicides proves she's a talent in her own right).