The film The Virgin Suicides made quite an impact on me when I watched it for the first time last night.  The film was tragic, haunting, and wrapped up in the nostalgic days of the 70's...It's use of dark humor involving adolescence in the 70's kept the film from becoming exceedingly dark but it is still a dark film, none-the-less. I found it's darkness and bleakness reminescent of films such as American Beauty and The Ice Storm.

The Virgin Suicides takes place in the upper class suburbs of Michigan. We are taken inside the lives of a family which on the outside would appear to be normal. Through the eyes of the neighborhood boys we try to figure out and understand what exactly is going on behind the doors of the Lisbons house.

Throughout the film, the neighborhood boys are somehow compelled to understand the lives of these girls and find some sort of connection with them, they collect pieces of memorabilia, watch them from the house across...They take pieces of the girls lives in order to try to make some sense out of the world these girls live in.

From the outside, The Lisbons appear to be the perfect family with the perfect house but that couldn't be further from the truth. The Lisbons have 5 perfect all american blonde teenage daughters. All of them possess a certain radiating pureness and angelic-like beauty.

As we slowly begin to understand what is going on within the family, we begin to see through the family's charade. The mother's oppressive nature and fanatic belief in the Catholic religion is clearly seen behind closed doors.

Smothered by their mother's overprotectiveness and rigid rules, the girls are slowly being suffocated by the environment which they are living in. There is never any chance for any of them to flourish or grow healthily. The environment is a sick one which the mother tries to mask from society.

Kathleen Turner convincingly plays the role of the strong, dominating, and neurotic mother of the Lisbon girls. There is a feeling of coldness in the way she interacts with her daughters and in the way she keeps them restricted from the outside world.

James Woods plays the role of the scattered and soft spoken father. Mr. Lisbon is somehow lost in all of this as he willingly stands back and allows his wife to take full control of the family. She is clearly the one in charge and the dominating force in the family. Mr. Lisbon's passiveness leads to his eventual mental deterioration. And, so the sickness manifested by the mother's rigid and obsessive ways eventually begins to seep into the family, poisoning everyone in the environment.

The film opens with the youngest daughter Cecilia's (played by Hannah Hall) suicide attempt. Upon seeing a psychiatrist, it is recommended that she be allowed to have more interaction with boys. In her parents attempt to provide normalcy for her, they decide to throw her a birthday party inviting all of the boys from the neighborhood.

For the age of 13, Cecilia is amazingly mature and seems able to see through the charade of normalcy that her parents have tried to create.  And so, this first attempt at introducing Cecilia to the social world of boys is too much for her, and it is at this party where she is successfully able to commit suicide, allowing her to escape from a world created by her own parents.

After asking permission from her mother to go up to her room, it is only minutes later that her body is found impaled on the fence in front of the house...There is a certain eerie effect in the way her body just lies on top of the fence as her father stands with his arms around her as if supporting her body.

Kirsten Dunst, the lead actress, plays Lux who exudes innocence and sexuality with a hint of naivety. She is seen by the boys as one of the most unattainable girls in school and so when the popular and most wanted boy in school, Trip (played by Josh Hartnett), first lays eyes on her, he knows he must have her.

At first Lux is not receptive to Trip's attempts to sway her, but then gradually she falls under the spell of his charm.  Once this occurs, her downfall becomes inevitable.

Somehow, Trip manages to talk Lux's father into convincing her mother to let him and his friends take her and her sisters to the Homecoming Dance. For the girls, this is their first real social interaction as Mrs. Lisbon had never allowed the girls to participate in anything social where they would not be supervised by her presence.

There is a certain giddiness and excitement captured in the scene where the girls are getting ready to go out to their first dance. And the excitement and tension mounts as the scene progresses into the dance...

At the school dance, Lux loses herself in the freedom she is given and this leads to her ultimate destruction. She is quickly sucked up into doing the things most forbidden by her mother...

After she gives herself to Trip, passionately and recklessly, on the football field, we see images of them both sleeping on the grass as the nite passes on...In the morning light, we are brought back to the football field where Lux lies on the grass alone. As she wakes up, the realization of what has been done and that she is alone becomes overwhelming as we sense her emptiness and aloneness. The huge empty football field seems to reflect that emptiness which stirs inside of her.

After Lux returns to her parents home and her heart is broken by Trip, her life only continues to go downhill. In result of the broken rules, Mrs. Lisbon takes it upon herself to confine the girls to the house like caged animals.

In the mother's attempt to close them off from the real world, they are taken out of school, confined to their rooms, while Lux is forced to burn her rock 'n' roll records. There is no escape from their tyrant of a mother or from the house which has imprisoned them.

As the film goes on, we see the father and his daughters slowly begin to lose their minds. Their spirits are fading and withering away...And as the film gets nearer and nearer to the end, any hope in the girls being set free from their imprisonment becomes diminished, and it becomes dimmer and dimmer as we realize that there is no escape, no way out for these girls....Because in Mrs. Lisbon's attempt to isolate the girls from the world, she has cut them off from their own existence, from their own lifeline which can only result in the most tragic of circumstances.

After their isolation from the social world, the neighborhood boys continue to try to figure out what is going on with the girls behind closed doors.  They gather at one of their houses across the street from the girls house and spy on them with telescopes and binoculars, hoping for some sort of glimpse into the world of these girls lives.

One night the girls reach out to them through the blinking of red lights calling out for help and they eventually start leaving secretive notes on girl's stationary and holy cards in places where the boys will find them. This interaction causes the boys to delve even deeper into the mysterious world of these girls.

The boys try to reach out to the girls through phone calls and music (records) played through the receiver and for a while they are communicating to each other through music via the phone. There is a sense of sadness and longing in these scenes...You ache for the boys to reach them and you want this connection to save them from the harsh realities of their lives. But in the end, the boys efforts are lost as we realize that no one can really get through to them or save them.

And, so we are left with the sad fact that no one was really able to reach the girls or know the girls very well because of the mother's successful attempt in isolating them from the real world and cutting them off from their own lives.

The life and death of the girls is almost as mysterious and unexplainable as those of saints. And there seems to be some sort of connection between religion and the mother's oppressive and controlling behavior. In some sense, it seems as though the girls have been cruelly sacrificed in result of their mother's selfishness.

And, by the ending of the film, we realize that the boys are the only ones who have been left with the memories of the girls and so they are the ones who are in fact the most haunted and affected by the lost lives of these girls.