......In the waning years of the 1970's, the entertainment industry, as it periodically does, took it upon itself to investigate the teenage experience. However, as the teenage experience of the 1970's seemed, complex as it had become, a somewhat dicey prospect for frothy entertainment, Hollywood chose instead to focus on adolescence as fondly remembered from the 1950's. Such a project was to have a sunny, nostalgic tone and might have a title comprised of words like "Happy" and "Days", and do little to indicate that being a teenager had been in any way just as difficult twenty years earlier.

......Towards the end of the '90's, teenagers again became a big deal to what Hollywood types like to refer to as "the zeitgeist", and, in the kind of symmetry that keeps Entertainment Weekly well-stocked with topics for vaguely thematic articles, the spotlight landed largely on the teenagers of the '70's. While a certain of these recent Me-Decade kid projects have indulged in a bit of hazy nostalgia, they're just as likely to focus on the dark side of those years when America was supposedly losing its innocence, what with, you know, Nixon and Kent State and all that. The auteurs of this new breed of retro-adolesce-tainment, if you will, seem bent on projecting this perceived societal deflowering onto the children of the era. These projects often depict the teenagers of the '70's as every bit as messed up as the ones we invented Richie and Fonzie to ignore, and their titles are apt to be made up of words like "Ice" and "Storm" -- or, better yet, "Virgin" and "Suicides".

......One might be tempted to ascribe this trend to the fact that, upon reaching a certain age, filmmakers can't stop resist trying to figure out just what it was that made their childhood tick, and the filmmakers reaching that certain age today grew up in the '70's. The Virgin Suicides certainly feels vividly rememberedÉ except that its director, 29-year-old Sofia Coppola, was just four years when the story she's telling ostensibly occurred. It's just as well, really; that frees her from a lot of the socio-political baggage generally brought to this burgeoning subgenre by people who have the misfortune to actually remember the period. So we're free from the obligatory montages of Vietnam and bra-burning and Watergate (Virgin star Kirsten Dunst having already done her time with Nixon in Dick,). Coppola compensates by honing in on a more ageless vision of just how confusing it really is to be a teenager. To keep the story in its time and place, she relies heavily on the original novel by Jeffry Eugenides (long passages of which are woven into her screenplay as narration), and a crack art department who seems to know that all the big sight-gags inherent in treating the '70's as a historical period have been tapped out in remarkably short order over recent years. There are still details in the fashion and design to make us chuckle -- the notebook-doodle title treatment being especially effective -- but the cleverness never overwhelms the story.

......That's inasmuch as there is a story. The title -- although not strictly accurate-- pretty much gives the game away from the start, and the opening few minutes go a long way towards filling in the rest of the details. Cecilia, the youngest of the five Lisbon sisters, has already attempted suicide once. She will have succeeded before too long, although not before delivering one of the film's key lines to psychologist trying put a positive spin on life for Cecilia, reminding her that she's only a thirteen year old girl. "Obviously, doctor," she deadpans, "you have never been a thirteen year old girl."

......While that manifesto implies that we're in for a serious exploration of the misery of the Lisbon girls, little could be farther from the real crux of the film. The sisters essentially remain ciphers for a group of neighboring boys, collectively embodied by Giovanni Ribisi's narration (by design, it's difficult to say which of the onscreen boys will grow up to be the narrator). We're really paying a visit to the male teenage psyche, particularly as warped by obsession. And the Lisbon girls are certainly the ideal objects of teenage obsession. They are brilliantly cast, inasmuch as they really do look like sisters, uniformly blonde, willowy, and sunlit, with even the improbably scant gaps between their ages plausibly accounted for. By and large, then, we are put in the position of the boys, looking on and wondering about the sisters, trying to unravel a mystery that wastes no time in taking on decidedly dark undertones.

......At first the boys observe from a distance, puzzling out the relationship between the girls and their restrictive parents (gamely portrayed by a pleasantly scattered James Woods and an effectively frumpy Kathleen Turner), or poring over Cecelia's journal just after her death. Soon, however, they are drawn fully into the sisters' orbit as cronies of Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett), the local football hero/loveable stoner, who has become infatuated with Lux Lisbon (Dunst). Trip, clearly on a higher plain of masculine confidence than the other boys, is able to engineer a group date to the homecoming dance with the Lisbons, at which he manages to have his way with Lux, only to unceremoniously abandon her afterwards. The fallout from the dance finds the girls under the most severe form of house arrest, disallowed from any contact with the outside world, and the boys even more fixated on making contact, somehow, with their muses.

......It's not that the girls are completely undeveloped, or that we get no insight into their lives. Dunst in particular gets room to develop Lux as a distinct entity, and the glimpses we get into the girls' homelife do address their emotions and frustrations. Ultimately, though, and necessarily, some things about their final fate remain obscure, or even nonsensical. What remains, then, is much more a portrait of what it's like to be a teenage boy. We're left with the impression that these particular boys have been arrested in these years permanently by the suicides and their involvement with the Lisbon girls.

......Coppola has a lot going for her in The Virgin Suicides. She has a deft sense for balancing the inherent darkness of the material with humor in a way that's more lyrical than biting. This is not a "black comedy" like Heathers or Welcome to the Dollhouse -- its humor has a more naturalistic touch. The languid tone is enhanced by the lush cinematography. This verdant, sunny '70's suburb is in many ways the polar opposite of the world in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (Suicides' clearest antecedent), with the Lisbon sisters repeatedly seen lazily draped throughout the frame in self-replicating "Dejeuner sur l'herbe"- type poses, all part of the scenery. The evocative score by French retro-electronic band Air melds well with the inevitable '70's tunes, functioning as another kind of spooky glue; if anything, the film could use more of it. Ribisi's affectless narration tamps down the histrionics and lends the proceeding an appropriate air of still-shocked remembrance.

......Somehow, though, the whole is less than the sum of the parts. Blame it on the Trip Fontaine character. As much fun as there is in Hartnett's performance, and as necessary as the character may be to the advancement of the plot (such as it is), his presence throws the film out of joint in a way that it can't quite recover from. Fontaine arrives on the scene a little too late, shakes things up, and then departs, never to be seen again, with four suicides yet to go. The rest of the boys are kept relatively generic, to better serve as our windows into the world of the film, and they're effective as such in the film's early scenes. They don't hold up so well in what should be the film's climax, seeming a little wan compared to the charisma we've gotten used to in Fontaine. It isn't a fatal structural flaw, but it does underline an overall problem in the film's shifting perspective (just where do these detailed glimpses into the Lisbon household come from?), a conceit that likely functions much better in a novel than in such a compact film as The Virgin Suicides.

......Sofia Coppola is, of course the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, whose directing resume includes a number of classics by most estimations. She's also the wife of Spike Jonze, whose debut feature Being John Malkovich was one of last year's highlights. The Virgin Suicides isn't quite up to that standard, but it's a hell of a lot better than, say, Jack, and would be a remarkable first feature by any measue. If it doesn't quite add up in the end, it's still rich with images and insight And all the more noteworthy as a study of the interior lives of teenage boys in the '70's from the point of view of someone who has been a thirteen year old girl..., albeit as recently as 1984.

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