This is a teen drama presented as a piece of existential horror, one that turns the unknowability of its subjects (five sisters who live a cloistered life in 1970s suburban Detroit) into the movie’s main character, so to speak. It’s a movie that borrows so many of the routines of youthful courtship and high-school melodrama-awkward dances, overbearing parents, confusing sexual encounters-but gives them unbearable weight. But The Virgin Suicides, adapted from Jeffrey Eugenides’s 1993 novel, remains the richer, more enduring work, a poetic meditation on the angst of teenagehood that’s at once deadly and dreamy. But that might just be the case for Sofia Coppola: The Virgin Suicides, released this week in a new Criterion Collection edition, was such a confident debut in 2000 that it immediately announced her as a generational talent, a status she cemented with her Oscar-winning follow-up, Lost in Translation.
It’s somewhat rare that a filmmaker’s first movie is their best, especially when they go on to have an illustrious career.
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