The Virgin Suicides

Coppola was first drawn to the story after reading the book by Jeffrey Eugenides in 1995, at the recommendation of musician Thurston Moore. Coppola said she felt really understood the teenage experience and the mystery that exists between boys and girls, as well as emotions. She has also said that if not for the book, she does not know that she would have a career in film. Coppola was scared to direct the film, but felt so connected to the material that she felt she needed to create it. Specifically, Coppola has highlighted the representation of teenagers “lazing around,” a situation she connected with but felt was not seen very much in films in any relatable way.

The story’s theme of loss was a personal connection for Coppola after her oldest brother had died suddenly in a boating accident, though she says this personal connection was one she says she did not immediately realize. She wanted to make a quality film for young audiences and treat that group with respect and properly examine this deeply emotional period of childhood. The film was low budget and critics were supportive.Coppola credits the start of her career to the Cannes festival after the film premiered there, and has said that this film was what made her a film-maker. The film has also been said to mark the point at which the public ceased to point to Coppola’s father as a reason for her success. Coppola’s father would not help her secure the rights to the novel, and so at that point she adapted the screenplay herself.

Plot

In the suburbs of Grosse Pointe, Michigan a group of neighborhood boys—now grown men—reflect upon their memories of the five Lisbon sisters, ages 13 to 17, in the late 1970s. Unattainable due to their Catholic faith and overprotective parents, math teacher Ronald and his homemaker wife, the girls Therese, Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Cecilia are an enigma that fills the boys' conversations and dreams.During the summer, the youngest sister, Cecilia, slits her wrist in a bathtub, but survives. After her parents allow her sisters to throw a chaperoned basement party intended to make her feel better, she excuses herself and is found having jumped out of her second story bedroom window, dying after she is impaled on an iron fence below. In the wake of her act, the Lisbon parents watch over their four remaining daughters even more closely. This further isolates the family from the community and heightens the air of mystery surrounding the girls, to the neighborhood boys in particular.

At the beginning of the new school year in the fall, Lux forms a secret and short-lived romance with Trip Fontaine, the school heartthrob. Trip comes over one night to the Lisbon residence in hopes of getting closer to Lux and watches television with the family. Trip persuades Mr. Lisbon to allow him to take Lux to the upcoming Homecoming Dance by promising to provide dates for the other sisters. After winning king and queen, Trip persuades Lux to ditch the group and have sex on the football field. Afterwards, Lux falls asleep, and Trip abandons her. At dawn, Lux wakes up alone and has to take a taxi home.

Having broken curfew, Lux and her sisters are punished by a paranoid Mrs. Lisbon by being taken out of school and confined to the house. The sisters contact the boys across the street by using light signals and sharing songs over the phone.During this time, Lux rebels against her repression and becomes overtly promiscuous, having anonymous sexual encounters on the roof of her house late at night; the neighborhood boys spy from across the street. After weeks of confinement, the sisters leave notes for the boys. The boys call the girls and reach them by phone, and the two groups take turns playing songs over the line. When the boys arrive that night, they find Lux alone in the living room, smoking a cigarette. She invites them inside to wait for her sisters, while she goes to start the car.

Curious, the boys wander into the basement after hearing a noise and discover Bonnie's body hanging from the ceiling rafters. Horrified, they rush back upstairs only to stumble across the body of Mary in the kitchen. The boys realize that the girls had all killed themselves in an apparent suicide pact: Bonnie hanged herself; Mary put her head in the gas oven; Therese overdosed on sleeping pills; and Lux died of carbon monoxide poisoning after she left the car engine running in the garage.

Devastated by the suicides, Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon leave the neighborhood. Mr. Lisbon has a friend clean out the house and sell off the family belongings in a yard sale. Whatever did not sell was put in the trash, including the family photos, which the neighborhood boys collect as mementos. The house is sold to a young couple from the Boston area. The adults in the community go about their lives as if nothing happened. The men acknowledge that they had loved the girls, and that they will never know why the sisters took their lives