Twenty-five years ago, the Sofia Coppola revelation

The cozy American suburbs of the 1970s, the ethereal music of the group Air, the impatience of first loves filmed with the lightness of innocent champagne bubbles, strings of pendants, vinyls, bracelets, lipsticks or handwritten notes which dot the the screen like so many enigmas to decipher and, last but not least, the diaphanous faces of Leslie Hayman, Chelse Swain, AJ Cook, Hanna R. Hall and Kirsten Dunst, captured in the sweet light of a late afternoon as in the twilight of an already unbreathable life: twenty-five years after its release, Virgin Suicides has lost none of its evocative charm or its power of fascination.

How did the events come together? Our collection of memorabilia from the Lisbon sisters began with Cecilia’s diary. So we began to learn about their lives. We understood the imprisonment of being a girl.

The narrator of “Virgin Suicides”

Inspired by the eponymous novel by Jeffrey Eugenides published in 1993, Sofia Coppola’s first film reveals the daily life, all the lighter as it sometimes turns out to be downright suffocating, of five teenage sisters from the chic neighborhoods of Detroit in the 1970s. Raised in a strict Catholic family, they come – out of idleness, isolation, weariness, unease, despair, solidarity? – to commit suicide. Told through the memories of their young neighbors, the film appears shrouded in a sort of poisonous vagueness, which is as much the mark of time that has passed as it is the characteristic of a male gaze fantasizing the lives of the five adolescent girls.
From her first film, Sofia Coppola manages to blow the heat (of memory, of childhood, of carelessness, of sensuality) and the cold (of the fatal gesture, of melancholy and of oppression). Aged then 28, the director became, in one film, the great filmmaker of male influence: “ We understoodsays the narrator in the introduction,the imprisonment of being a girl. ” Of Marie Antoinette, his second film, Priscillathe latest, Sofia Coppola has never stopped filming the alienation of women, between resignation and rebellion, establishing herself over the course of a faultless filmography peppered with numerous successes (Lost in Translation, The Prey), as the reference for a cinema that is less feminist than purely, stubbornly, simply feminine – a cinema that dares to question relationships of domination and, years before #MeToo, rightly deconstruct the famous Hollywood “male gaze”. Be careful, masterpiece.

Published on September 26, 2024