The Virgin Suicides: Faces Behind the Shattered Glass
Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides did not premiere like a blockbuster in 1999. Rather, it quietly ascended to cult film status, eliciting a dreamlike, unsettling, and profoundly tender response. The film, an adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel, portrays the Lisbon sisters, five teenage girls in suburban 1970s America. Their lives are lovingly watched and gradually repressed by a town that can only bear witness as their story slowly unfolds.
Of all the sisters, it was Lux Lisbon, played by Kirsten Dunst, who became the haunting heart of the film. Lux’s tragic and rebellious spirit was rooted in the conflict of adolescence, femininity, and societal expectations that challenged young women, helping portray her as an iconic character of the era.
Lux Lisbon: The Shimmering Flame
Lux Lisbon is the sister who burns brightest, the one who dares to defy the fragile boundaries drawn by her family. While her sisters embody a passive and torturous subservience, Lux is the only one who breaks the bounds of her family. She is the girl smoking on rooftops, sneaking kisses in shadowy corners, and riding the edge of addiction, all in a desperate dance of defiance and fleeting freedom.
Kirsten Dunst’s character in The Virgin Suicides, Lux, represents more than teenage prenatal rebellion. Dunst’s portrayal represents the intersection of fantasy and reality. For the neighborhood boys narrating the film, Lux is a goddess. For Lux, she is just a girl trying to navigate through desire and heartbreak, and worse, in a conservative home.
Kirsten Dunst: Growing Up Too Fast
At sixteen and after filming The Virgin Suicides, Dunst had already been in Interview with the Vampire and Jumanji. As child star, the expectations of adult roles loom over her. The Virgin Suicides and the character of Lux became crucial to Dunst’s career in that she became the first adult actress to play sexually liberated and vulnerable cinema characters in a post sexual liberation era.
In her interviews, she claimed that the essence and intensity of Dunst’s character Lux, was something she couldn’t understand, and that she was just a restlessly simple teenager. She described her feeling of having a limbinant world and that she was feeling split was the same liminal space that Lux was in. On the demands of balancing education with her Hollywood career, she often spoke of the typical Hollywood-movie limbo seperating the worlds of a character and the reality she was in.
Her performance was raw, not because she grasped every nuance, but because she experienced a similar kind of tempestuous adolescence. During some scenes, Coppola encouraged improvisation and was particularly keen to capture Dunst’s natural teenage awkwardness and bravado. This was responsible for the authenticity that made Lux memorable.
A Director Who Understood the Language of Girlhood
As a first-time director, Sofia Coppola differentiated herself by how she framed the Lisbon sisters, drawing upon her own teenage loneliness and isolation with a distinctive softness. She has often remarked that she wanted the film to evoke the sensation of seeing old photographs—nostalgic with softly fading colors, but shadowy remnants lurking around the edges. Lux’s character was not only a product of the novel but also a product of Coppola’s internalization of the societal imposition on young women and the displacement of their voices over the years.
Lux’s first love with Trip Fontaine, her attempts to feel free outside her mother’s suffocating embrace, and the general sense of desperation were anchored in the 1970s America which was home to a deeply rooted suburban sexual repression and a clashing sexual liberation.
The Hype and the Quiet Storm
Upon its debut at the Cannes festival in 1999, the Virgin Suicides appeared perplexing to its audiences, and for good reason. It certainly was not a teenage drama in the bright and cheerful obsequies of Clueless, nor was it solely a tragedy of the old world. The ghostly voice over of Giovanni Ribisi, the Truffaut like pastel color and the Air sound track made it hauntingly beautiful, like a distant and fragile memory.
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