What the heck is this movie about?

I loved the movie and I really loved reading all the interpretation people gave about it. Personally I never was wondering those things about the movie because I really saw myself on it. I am only child and when I was teenager my mother was like the mother was, she never let me hang with friends, boys or go out, and my father was totally absent. I tried many times to commit suicide because I could not suport be a prisoner, "be alone"..All my teenager time was in home, going school and coming back as soon school ended, my mother even was countig in how long would take me arrive, once she let me go downtown to get clothes and i arrived 2 hs later and my punisment was spend all summertime in home only reading...she never ever change of mind, she always said it was because she loved me and she was protecting me but ddid not matter how loud could cry and try to make her understand what she was doing to me, even if i tried to speak to someone older to speak to her, there was not way..Im glad i did not killed myself, in all those moment something was telling me that maybe tomorrow would be diferent. It never was and I just become a lonely and depress person that time in time has again those thought.
In the end what I was trying to say, is not my story, but just make understand how awful live can turn on when your freedom and freewill is cut off in a part of life when you are trying to discover who you are and that suicide can come to your mind and when you are young a simple moment can take your life away. Either im trying to say ALL teenagers that has parents like these or mine are going to think in suicide or do it, but that could happen and that is not so crazy.

I suspected that the film is about misunderstood girls who were under the control of their strict and religious parents. They were deprived of being normal teenage girls, their sexuality, and own opinions. The movie was more of a commentary on parents and how they can have an affect on their children. It also showed that the girls were being imprisoned in their own home to the point of feeling as if there was no way out but to commit suicide.

You love me more than sunny summer days.

the film never really gives an answer. I have heard it follows the book quite closely, even in this regard, but having never read the book I can't really comment, though I would hope it would offer something more. However this kind of ambiguity annoys me. Not because I expect one simple easy answer, but because it offers us nothing more than life might. There were a series of suicides in Wales a few years ago - teenagers - and as here, no one could understand the connections nor the reasons. There were interviews, news reports, expert opinions - exactly as we get here, but surely the whole point of a film is to give us more than what we can get from the normal sources, to speculate by taking us closer to the heart of the situation?

However, based on the very loose information we are given, I would say that the answer lies not in the sexual identities of the girls - that feels exactly like what you are talking about, other people overlaying their own prejudices on the girl's psyche's. There is never any suggestion that the attention given them is inappropriate or unwanted, the boys are just typical teenagers and in many ways rather sweet.

No, I would say it was a group delusion/hysteria brought about by their grief and the claustrophobic atmosphere created by their parents. There is a very strong group identity, yet very little evidence of any individuality. The girls, as some have pointed out, are virtually interchangeable. I don't think we should presume this is to be the result of poor character development by sofia or sexual callousness on behalf of the boys. They dress alike, look alike, are very close in age, and seem to have no life outside of one another. When Lux is asked to the dance, all her sisters must go, not merely one elder sister as chaperone. Even prior to the younger girl's suicide, the curiosity of the neighbourhood suggests that they have always kept themselves to themselves. Then when the boys are seducing them, they do so to 'the sisters' as a group. The one girl who does dare to step out and become an individual, Lux, is punished for doing so, both by Trips rejection and her parents reaction.

In reclusion I would imagine that identity coupled with grief may simply have become overwhelming. Something like phantom limb syndrome, where the sense of being incomplete without their missing sister became too much to bear. It might even be that, perhaps again symbolised by Lux, the one who greets the boys, that not all of the girls wanted to die, but that sense of being 'one' was simply too strong and they could not go on without one another.

I don't know about anyone else, but for me, the film was about how people who commit suicide are denied their own voices. That's why the girls motives are left a mystery, why there's very little pay-off in regard to who the girls where, and why the story is told through the point of view of boys who didn't have all that close a relationship with the girls to begin with.

There's this preconception that people who commit suicide (especially teenage girls as they don't have any "real" problems) are selfish, and that the tragedy isn't that they took their lives, but the fact that they left friends and family behind. In what other case of death does this happen? And I know that there are exceptions to any generalizations and that there are plenty cases where this DOESN'T happen. But still most people think of people who want to commit suicide are weak and selfish.

The film actively denies the girls any person-hood and agency, because the cultural consensus of suicide does the same thing. Their charcaters are pretty much interchangeable, they're given hardly any kind of development, except for Lux, and they're denied any kind of motive, which should be a lot more complex than that their parents were suffocating.

Even though they are the main focus of the film and the ones who suffer, their tragedy isn't their own. Because, who cares? No point in caring about who they were or why they took their lives, they're dead anyway.

We're told that the girls knew everything about life and held all the cards? Bullcrap. That's just something the boys told each other to justify the fact that they were worshiping people they knew nothing about.

That's why you don't find out why the girls killed themselves, because they can't make the story ABOUT the girls. They need to tell it from the perspective of someone the act of suicide hurt, because that brings out far more sympathy than just telling it straight.

So, why not the parents? Most people will blame them too. But the girls didn't HAVE anyone else, so the story belongs to the boys who put them up on a pedestal and claimed to love them while knowing nothing about them.

[deleted]

Sophia Coppola makes movies that are very artsy and evoke moods but she's relying on you to fill in the blanks, I think. Lost in Translation is another good example.

However, the book The Virgin Suicides is one of those books that won't allow anything more than a broad adaptation to make it to screen. Like Kurt Vonnegut's works, they've best enjoyed in print.

you're asking way too many questions, this film is not a complicated one.

also, "If I could talk to Sofia Coppola I'd ask her about that first"

you could just read the book?

Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things. - George Carlin

I`m pretty sure it was meant to be about parenting, and some manner of suburban air of repression, but all of it felt kinda contrived and overwrought. Not to mention drenched in pretty, golden-hued nostalgia to a tee. The ending`s borderline preposterous - in large part due to relatively thin character development.



"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan