Without a doubt Sofia Coppola is one of my favourite directors and storytellers. I love how she capture monuments of a character’s life and their story through her dreamy and whimsical visuals and limited dialogue. After watching her directorial debut, The Virgin Suicides, I decided to read the book to see how they compared to each other (like I do with most film and texts).
Witten by Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides tells the story of the five Lisbon sisters in 1970’s America (as always Coppola made a brilliant job of bringing this alive with her soft-focus filming technique). The girls have a really strict, religious and at times oppressive upbringing conducted by their parents. They keep them in some sort of isolation from the real world for the most part, like in school no one really talks to them. Because of this they have the inability to lead their own, normal teenage life.
You are told of the suicides of all girls early in the book, so you spend your time reading the book to pick out and try and find the reasonings to their deaths. You never really understand why. The majority of the book isn’t even about suicide itself but more about adolescence and how we never really understand what’s really going on with somebody. I like that Coppola didn’t fill in the gaps that Eugenides left when building these characters and their stories as I feel that if she did that the actual story of the mysteries of adolescence. It would become overloaded and lost.
In both the book and film, the story is narrated by a very interesting perspective of a chorus of unnamed men. Unlike the film, you are never really introduced these narrators. So, you don’t really know who talking and you can’t picture it in your mind and can become a little bit lost. I like how the film shows the narrators and how they are intertwined in the Lisbon girls’ lives and is able to tell their story in a more personal form. Coppola did a good job of making the narrators feel more like their own character within the story.
I understand when filmmakers adapt books into film that the authors lyricism can be lost with its translation on to the screen as you can’t put every line on the screen. It’s a visual medium so the effects of an author’s words have on people doesn’t and can’t always come across visually. But Coppola, however, is such a visual artist so she does translate this lyrical tone into some really beautiful shots. The topic of the story itself if quite dark with even a depressing tone in the title, but this is contrasted well with Coppola’s filming style which tends to be dreamy and youthful. I find that this is very important as a subject like suicide can be portrayed in a gritty, unwatchable form.
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