Easily this film goes down as one of my all-time favorites. It’s more of a piece of fine art rather than a film for entertainment.

The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sophia Coppola, will leave you with a feeling of numbness and deep depression if watched in the wrong mood, so the feint of heart beware! This film was created from the book of the same name by Jeffery Eugenides, a true artist whose medium is literature. And oftentimes I am disappointed by films adapted from books but this film pays homage to the writer in every possible way painting her picture from the words on the pages of the book just the way I would have seen them, too.

The Lisbon sisters are Mary (A.J. Cook), Therese (Leslie Hayman), Bonnie (Chelse Swain), Lux (Kirsten Dunst), and Cecilia (Hanna Hall) and are in the thick of their coming-of-age under the rule of their extremely strict and religious parents, Mrs. Lisbon (Kathleen Turner) and Ronald Lisbon (James Woods) who basically don’t want them to experience their adolescence in any form and keep them locked up like prisoners season-to-season in their home. They’re allowed to go to school, and nothing more. Lux is even, at one point, forced to burn all of her rock albums in the fireplace. This entrapment, of course, leads to their demise.

Cecilia was the first to go. This line pulls you straight into the story, as Cecilia, the youngest, the first to attempt their ultimate goal of suicide, floats in a tub of warm water turning pink from the cuts on her wrist, doesn’t wind up dead within the first five minutes of the film, but rather fails and spends the rest of her appearance with bandages wrapped thickly around her tiny wrists. So of course this is a wake up call for the family, who rather than try to listen to the girls’ calls for help, tighten their reigns. Even the school’s administration where Ronald works as a math teacher and the girls attend worry about the girls sudden disappearance from class. But Cecilia’s attempt sparks the interest of a group of four boys who stare into their house and try to peer into their lives from a house across the street. They daydream about the girls and saving them from their entrapment, collecting souvenirs like the Virgin Mary cards that keep showing up on odd places like their bike spokes, Cecilia’s diary, magazines the girls order. They go to school with the girls but never speak to them, but ache to be close to them. They are jealous of anyone who does, and the only boy who ever actually got to penetrate the walls of the house was Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett), a football player and major dreamboat!!, and he asks Ronald for his permission to take Lux to the Homecoming Dance. The only date any of the girls would ever be on, because Lux does not ever make it home that night, but instead stumbles out of a cab the next morning, causing Mrs. Lisbon to completely cut them off from the outside world and placing them on permanent lock-down in the house. But of course this just fuels the four boys’ desire to have a relationship with them, so they plot to get them out of the house, take the family station wagon and drive somewhere far away and stay wherever it is they land. They even make it so far as the back door.

I could go on and on about this film, but I don’t want to give the whole story away! Everything about this film is absolutely gorgeous: Sophia’s way with the camera is exquisite and gives the whole film a look of vintage, which is useful as the film takes place “25 years ago.” The original score, written and performed by a favorite band of mine, Air, adds to the feeling of unease and eeriness throughout the whole film. The acting is simple yet fits the characters perfectly: one of my favorite character is James Woods’ as the father who is so reigned-in by his wife he doesn’t actually get to have a mind of his own so it comes out in really odd ways, particularly while asking the plants on a windowsill at school, “Did you photosynthesize your breakfast today?”

Coppola also uses many lines from the book, and is just short of narrating line-by-line. Giovani Ribisi narrates and sounds nothing like the goofy characters he often plays, rather adding to the detached mood of the film.

This film is not for everyone, certainly. You have to understand a certain type of horribly depressing and unfeeling art, and not everyone will. But if you have the capacity for such things I recommend this film. It’s definitely the best in Coppola’s portfolio, and she does great job of capturing Eugenide’s imagination on film.

The one thing I will say about the ending, is it’s got the absolute best closing scene of any movie. Just the four boys holding a lighter up to a vacant house, like at a rock concert, hungover and dried out after an all-night debutante ball, and still just shocked as to what has all occurred mere days before.

What lingered after them was not life, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.