WATCH PARTY: The Virgin Suicides (1999) dir Sofia Coppola @ Mary Pretlow Library
Details
I have seen and enjoyed a couple other Sofia Coppola movies, but never got around to watching this! (h/t cinephile Sydney S.)
RUNTIME: 97 minutes
SYNOPSIS (via Criterion): With this debut feature, Sofia Coppola announced her singular vision, exploring the aesthetics of femininity while illuminating the interior lives of young women. An adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’s highly acclaimed first novel, The Virgin Suicides conjures the ineffable melancholy of teenage longing and ennui in its story of the suicides of the five Lisbon sisters, stifled by the rules of their overprotective religious parents—as told through the collective memory of a group of men who were boys at the time and still yearn to understand what happened. Evoking its 1970s suburban setting through ethereal cinematography by Ed Lachman and an atmospheric score by Air, and featuring a magnetic performance by Kirsten Dunst, the film secured a place for its director in the landscape of American independent cinema and has become a coming-of-age touchstone.
BLURBS:
"A disarmingly poetic - and specifically female - vision of adolescence that it belongs in a category of its own." - Moira McDonald, Seattle Time
"More than most recent movies about suburban adolescence, The Virgin Suicides catches both the triviality and the grandeur of youth, its prosaic details and its mythopoetic flights." - A.O. Scott, The New York Times
"The film unspools with such a rich and peculiar unpredictability that it feels as though we are seeing -- or dreaming -- these things for the first time." - Sarah Hepola, Austin Chronicle