Extract: 'Sofia Coppola: Forever Young' by Hannah Strong
“I wanted to make something that was artful for girls,” Sofia Coppola explained in a 2018 interview with Criterion, ahead of The Virgin Suicides’s rerelease in a plush special edition with a 4K restoration and a raft of special features. Her own experience as a film-loving teenager in the 1980s had left her disillusioned: “Movies made for teenagers didn’t respect the audience. The cinematography was bad [ . . . ] and it would always be thirty-year-olds cast as teenagers. Besides John Hughes, there wasn’t anyone portraying them in a way I could relate to. I felt like it was part of the culture that wasn’t being dealt with.” Indeed, Coppola’s list of her favorite films, published in 2020 by Rotten Tomatoes, makes evident her fascination with youth on-screen.
There’s Sixteen Candles, but also Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and her own father’s Rumble Fish. It makes perfect sense, then, that Coppola would choose to channel this interest into her own art—out of an impasse in her young life after dabbling in acting, fashion design and photography came The Virgin Suicides. Her source material, the 1993 debut novel of Michigan-born author Jeffrey Eugenides, was inspired by a conversation he’d had with his nephew’s babysitter, who told him that she and her sisters had tried to commit suicide. When he asked why, she said only, “We were under a lot of pressure.” Coppola was recommended the novel by her friend Thurston Moore, founding member of Sonic Youth, and was instantly struck by a close-up photograph of long blonde hair on its cover—a detail that would become integral to her own vision of the Lisbon sisters, some six years later.
In both the book and film, a group of men (represented in dialogue by Giovanni Ribisi’s unnamed narrator) from Grosse Pointe, 24 The Virgin Suicides 1999 97minutes Budget $6million Box Office $10million 24 Lux belatedly travels home from the prom in a taxi; the first instance of the “Coppola Shot,” demonstrating a yearning for freedom through transition. 25 Portrait of Ophelia by Millais. Coincidentally the painting would later inspire a scene in Lars von Trier's Melancholia, in which Kirsten Dunst plays a depressed bride facing the imminent end of the world. 26 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. For several years Kirsten Dunst was attached to an adaptation of Plath's book into a film, starring Dakota Fanning. 46 SOFIA COPPOLA: FOREVER YOUNG INNOCENCE & VIOLENCE Michigan, reflect on the mystery surrounding the five Lisbon sisters (Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese), who all committed suicide over the course of one year in the seventies.
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While the boys don’t know the girls particularly well in reality, through meticulous observation and endless theorizing they form a unilateral connection with them, unable to understand what drove them to such an unspeakable end, they remain fixated on the sisters’ story. Coppola connected instantly: “It felt like Jeffrey Eugenides really understood the experience of being a teenager: the longing, the melancholy, the mystery between boys and girls,” she explained. Yet the idea of adapting the novel for the screen—or entering the filmmaking field at all—didn’t come about until later, when Coppola became aware that a film was in pre production, with a male director and script written by Nick Gomez. “I really didn’t know I wanted to be a director until I read The Virgin Suicides and saw so clearly how it had to be done,” she said in the film’s production notes. So despite warnings from her parents, she did the one thing a screenwriter should never do: adapted a novel she didn’t have the rights to. Initially her script was intended purely as a thought exercise for her own development as a writer, but after catching wind that the Gomez production had fallen through, she sent her draft to Chris and Roberta Hanley of Muse Productions, who owned the film rights— and would coincidentally also oversee Mary Harron’s blistering adaptation of American Psycho, released the same year—hoping they would consider her vision. Undoubtedly Sofia’s surname played a role in their decision to read this unsolicited script, as well as to take a chance on a first-time female director whose behind-the-camera experience was limited to assisting her father on his productions and creating one fourteen minute short film (1998’s Lick the Star.)
It’s important to recognize the impact that the Coppola name had on Sofia’s debut: not only did the family production company American Zoetrope work alongside Paramount, Muse, and Eternity Pictures, but Kathleen Turner, who played the Lisbon matriarch in the film, was the first actor cast after having worked with Francis Ford Coppola on 1986’s Peggy Sue Got Married—and he personally sent his daughter’s script to his friend James Woods, who would sign on to play the girls’ father, Ronald Lisbon. Principal photography took place in Toronto in July of 1998, and lasted about a month. A documentary shot by Eleanor Coppola on set captures Sofia and her team at work, with Eugenides and her family spending some time behind the scenes. Francis Ford Coppola, wearing a selection of vivid Hawaiian shirts, is credited as “Proud Father/ Filmmaker” and Sofia laughs about her father telling her to be more authoritative on set. But the young cast remain most beguiling to watch. Kirsten Dunst—just sixteen at the time of shooting—remarks, “I think it’s important that a female writes the script, because it’s all about these five girls.” If only Hollywood had her conviction when it came to crafting female driven narratives. At the time The Virgin Suicides was released, it was still relatively novel to see a female filmmaker given the resources to write and direct her own feature; Coppola’s access to resources was undoubtedly invaluable, but no substitute for the sharp eye and intuition which she brought to production. So this is how it starts: with the ambient summer chorus of cicadas and children yelling, on a yellow-green tree-lined suburban street in Grosse Pointe, 1974.
“These opening two minutes of The Virgin Suicides pose a question to the audience: are you the teenage boys and neighbors curiously watching the commotion from outside, or are you Cecilia Lisbon, glassyeyed, waiting for oblivion? I knew instantly which one I was. To be a teenage girl is to exist in a seemingly endless state of limbo.”
There, in the middle of the street, is Dunst’s Lux Lisbon, squinting into the distance as she finishes a bright red popsicle. A woman waters her lawn, a couple walk a yellow labrador, and two workmen nail a gaudy orange “Notice for Removal” to an impressive elm tree, while the opening bars of Air’s dreamy piano and saxophone “Playground Love” play. In an instant, the world goes quiet, save a dripping tap, as the scene cuts to the cool blue of the Lisbon bathroom: a cluttered shelf full of cosmetics; a crucifix. Then, the shriek of sirens, as Ribisi, in his flat, almost disaffected voice, tells us: “Cecilia was the first to go.” A petite thirteen-year-old descendant of Millais’s Ophelia, Cecilia lies supine in the pink water of a bathtub clouded with her blood, just for a moment—before the sunlight and music return, the world spinning madly on. “What are you doing here, honey?” A doctor asks Cecilia (Hanna R. Hall, present for only twenty minutes of screentime but utilizing every second to portray a teenage girl on the brink of annihilation) as she recovers in hospital. “You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.” Despondent, Cecilia utters a line cemented in popular culture, word-for-word as it appeared in Eugenides’s novel: “Obviously, doctor, you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.” These opening two minutes of The Virgin Suicides pose a question to the audience: are you the teenage boys and neighbors curiously watching the commotion from outside, or are you Cecilia Lisbon, glassyeyed, waiting for oblivion? I knew instantly which one I was. To be a teenage girl is to exist in a seemingly endless state of limbo.
Caught between innocence and experience, it’s the first time young women become aware of so many strange, devastating things: the power and grotesqueness which simultaneously exists within our bodies; the magical, terrifying differences between girls and boys; the expectations suddenly thrust upon us regarding how to dress, act and temper our ambitions; our lack of control over any of these forces; and—perhaps most devastating of all—how difficult it is to articulate all of the above. In Eugenides’s novel, the Lisbon sisters are ethereal, faceless entities. Told from multiple perspectives, the story offers a male-given oral history of the unthinkable rather than a straightforward account, and in an interview with Dazed, the author said he wished each sister had been played by multiple actors, to reflect the shifting, inconsistent gaze of their admirers. Coppola cast a quintet of lithe, pretty blondes instead: Hall and Dunst as Cecilia and Lux, and Chelse Swain, A.J. Cook, and Leslie Hayman as their elder sisters, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese.
Their introduction in the film imbues the girls with a rockstar quality, as they emerge from the family car to the sounds of Sloan’s aptly-named rock bop “On the Horizon,” each sister presented in freeze-frame with a different handwritten title card bearing their name, giving them individuality they are scarcely afforded for the rest of the film. The boys watch them, enthralled, before they begin to speculate about the details of Cecilia’s suicide attempt. Gossip— traditionally associated with women and especially teenage girls—is the boys’ main way of getting to know the Lisbon sisters, who are always just beyond their reach. It’s a far cry from the traditional teen comedies Coppola cites as influences, where the guy always gets the girl, and the girl is happy with that. Coppola’s Lisbon girls are also unfailingly human, in stark contrast from their shape-shifting literary counterparts. While the 25 26 47 novel is preoccupied with visions of the sisters as perceived by their admirers, Eugenides remarks that Coppola was more interested in the women than the male narrators. But he adds that her version is closer to how he felt about the girls personally—an inherent sympathy, for both what they undergo and how their lives are vigorously dissected by a group of near strangers. This gaggle of observers realize in the aftermath of the Lisbons’ deaths, over the course of years, that they never really saw them at all.
Words: Hannah Strong
Her monograph on the work of Sofia Coppola will be released May 16 in the USA and May 28 in the UK by Abrams New York. You can order it here.
