'The Virgin Suicides'
Last night we watched The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola. I enjoy watching movies that are a little off the beaten path, not your typical romantic comedy or action film, but I'm not sure I quite got this one.
Has anyone else seen the movie or read the book? While it was visually entertaining, I don't know that I felt a lot of storyline there. Maybe the book has something else in it that the movie doesn't get. One review I read says that the movie is about how men can never understand what it's like to be a thirteen year old girl or a thirty year old woman. But it seemed a little weak to me.
I guess the boys in the movie were supposed to be really obsessed with these girls, but they didn't seem that obsessed to me. Maybe I'm just thinking of movies like The Sandlot, where the message of the kid's obsession with baseball really resonated. Yes, they're two totally different types of movies, but it just seemed like any plot having to do with the boys was an afterthought. I think Sofia Coppola relied on the four blonde sisters, including Kirsten Dunst, to mezmerize the audience so that they didn't notice there was no unifying theme, just dreamy screenshots, a quintessential 70's soundtrack, and artistic play.
Labels: Movies
2 Comments:
I own both book and movie. I like that elusive quality about it, and the book is the same, but there's more to it, you know? Anyway, I've watched it quite a bit, and the thing that becomes clearer to me each time is how, throughout the movie, the voice over talks about how they don't understand, never understand, etc. Soon you realize that the pieces of the puzzle are there for them, but they just never focus on the important stuff, the right things, to answer all their questions.
I think you're right. There's not a lot to it, plotwise - it's pretty linear. I think the focus of the movie lies not really with the plot, but with the narrator and the idea of legend. The boys are really just there as narrator, extremely unreliable narrator, giving us the retelling of what amounts to a neighborhood legend. I think the camera and the dreamy filming is supposed to reflect that, that the boys see the girls through this filter of time and magic, and in fact, we aren't getting the real story at all.
That's what i like about it, the idea that there is a real story sort of trapped behind the boys telling of it, but we won't ever know what really went on, because they are the only source of information that we have. Sort of like the bits that the boys collected are the only source of information they have, and the conclusions they draw really depend on which bits they focus on. In the same way, the conclusions we draw depend on which bits of the movie we focus on. And at the end, our state of mind reflects the boys - that there must be more to it, it couldn't be so simple, and what is it that we aren't grasping?
anyway, that's my take on it. jeez, give an english grad student an inch... :)
Yeah, I can't disagree with any of what you said. In fact it probably explains a lot of why I feel the way I do. We don't get the whole story, the important story, and I want it. So I'm just left feeling frustrated and wanting something I can't get. I want an answered. I want a definitive, "this is why..." And the dreamy quality it's shot with exactly mimics the boys rather naive telling of the story.
Thank you, english grad student. I'll have to review movies/books more often.
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