The Virgin Suicides

When Winona Ryder jumped ship at the last minute, Sofia Coppola was pressed into service in The Godfather Part III.

By keeping it in the family, in the Mafia tradition, Francis Ford Coppola did his daughter a disservice, and she took up photography instead.

Ten years later, she re-emerges as a cinema talent, directing her own adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides' cult novel in her intriguing, idiosyncratic and enchanted debut movie.

The Virgin Suicides is the languid tale of the five Lisbon sisters and their mysteriously doomed suburban adolescence in the early Seventies, as re-told in enamoured, damaged adulthood by the high-school boys who mourn the suicide blondes to this day.

Aged 13 to 17, the golden sisters are impossibly beautiful and as out of bounds as Rapunzel; tentatively exploring the delicious and dubious delights of teenhood - delights considered forbidden fruits by their over-protective, obsessive parents (mild maths teacher James Woods and his matriarch wife, an equally unrecognisable Kathleen Turner, both playing against type).

After youngest daughter Cecilia finds a fatal use for their white picket fencing, the aloof Lux (Kirtsen Dunst) and her secretive sisters become even more of an object of desire. Neighbourhood boys with a crush on the outside, Mr and Mrs Lisbon with their crushing religious regime within, how can they escape?

The answer still shocks, not least because no reason is given, no blame attributed, adding to the riddle of lost youth and its fascination with suicide. And yet, aided by the chic, retro soundtrack of French dudes Air and a flair for embarrassing Seventies' fashions, The Virgin Suicides has the sly, death-black humour of a Grimm but not grim fairytale. Where American Beauty came up with answers, The Virgin Suicides adds a cool, quirky question mark to the question. Blissfully strange.

Charles Hutchinson

19/05/00