The Virgin Suicides

I found The Virgin Suicides at Media Markt for five marks in the remainder section. The kind of place you drift into on an afternoon with nowhere better to be. Sofia Coppola’s debut, and I’d been meaning to watch it again for years.

There’s something Coppola does where she finds the most beautiful moment inside something fundamentally dark, and holds the camera there until you can’t look away. The Virgin Suicides is about five girls sealed in a house by their paranoid parents, and what longing becomes when it has nowhere to go. She shoots them close—faces, clothes, objects in rooms. There’s something voyeuristic about it, honest in a way that makes you uncomfortable. This is how they register to the boys outside the house. This is how memory exaggerates them.

The film is made from those neighbors’ recollections years later, moving through them like you’re inside a half-awake dream, a memory of a memory. It’s suffocating and beautiful. The Air soundtrack gets it because it sounds like longing itself—synths caught between pretty and mournful, refusing to choose.

What matters is how the film treats its subjects as people, not symbols. They’re just young, bored, trapped, and eventually defeated. Kirsten Dunst is luminous here in a way that rarely surfaces again—something about this moment, this role. You understand why the boys next door were destroyed by them. You end up just as destroyed watching.