Twenty-five years on, Sofia Coppola’s debut film continues to shape how we see girlhood
In depicting Cecilia Lisbon’s first attempt to end her life, Sofia Coppola created a timeless image. Her seminal adaptation of The Virgin Suicides is filled with these, but this frame of a 14-year-old Hanna R. Hall always stayed with me: lying in the still pink water of a bathtub with her tawny hair splayed out, expression serene. Bathed in the dim blue of summer twilight, the scene is a conscious echo of John Everett Millais’s Ophelia, whose fictional subject is also clothed in a pale gown, part-submerged and in the throes of madness. Evoking enduring images like Pre-Raphaelite portraits and religious motifs, Coppola situates her depictions within a long tradition of art history, staging contemporary scenes that feel both familiar and eternal.
Like many others who first encountered the film as a teenager, the Lisbons’ sticker-lined bathroom ledge was instantly recognisable to me as an altar to girlhood by way of consumption – powder brushes, perfume bottles, nail polish, lipstick, bangles and candles – and through the strategic draping of a crystal bead and crucifix necklace, implicit of a life constrained by Catholic upbringing. Kitschy compelling details like these are a hallmark of Coppola’s cinematic work, which critics today recognise as having a profound influence on the iconography of female melancholy.
When the filmmaker, then 27 years old, began shooting the suburban malaise of her debut feature, she had already dipped a toe in several industries – having appeared in multiple music videos, produced four episodes of an ill-fated Comedy Central series and interned at Chanel as a high schooler. In this respect, Coppola is arguably as much a part of the pop culture infrastructure as a formative influence upon it, and her multidisciplinary approach has become second nature for style-adjacent brands anxious to keep evolving their offering.
In aestheticising the Lisbon girls’ suffering, she made a non-physical illness legible to audiences who might struggle to grasp its invisibility. By doing this, Coppola also iconised the ‘sad girl’, positioning her as a disruptor rather than a victim and turning her into a vaguely aspirational figure. She’s effortlessly beautiful, stoic in her abjection, and with a sympathetic rage in her heart; she is given agency, and therefore dignity, in the deaths she dies.
In a recent retrospective for The New York Times, Emily Yoshida writes that Coppola’s films comprise a “stylistic manual for how to be sad, or at least disaffected” in today’s world. But Coppola’s filmography isn’t instructive as much as it is unabashedly expressive and unfailingly allied to the visual, experiential and imaginative – a Magic Eye book more than a manual. However, this hasn’t stopped players in fashion, film and music from taking extensive notes, or adopting concepts wholesale.
The most high-profile designer in this regard is Marc Jacobs, with whom Coppola has an artist-muse relationship described as one of fashion’s “great platonic love stories”: she’s modelled in his campaigns, sat front-row at his fashion shows and worn his clothes to her premieres. In 2014, Coppola directed a short for Daisy Dream, the then-latest instalment in Jacobs’ cult-favourite perfume line. The video uses the dissolve transitions employed in the dream sequences of The Virgin Suicides, which also feature fading palimpsests of blue sky and grassy fields. Campaign face Antonia Wesseloh is styled in accordance with the naturalistic Lisbon girl look, wearing a flowy prairie-style dress and imperceptible makeup, her long hair lank and loose around her shoulders.
While Coppola didn’t install lithe young white girls as the aesthetic ideal, her films further glorified and romanticised their appearance, reinforcing a narrow scope of desirable femininity and unfortunately contributing to an ever-expanding repository of imagery weaponised online to inspire anorexia. Thus, Coppola’s heroines live a second life on social media as “nostalgia effigies”, a term used by cultural critic Safy-Hallan Farah, who also invokes Tavi Gevinson’s Rookie magazine, the photography of Petra Collins, and “Lana Del Rey’s fully-realised visual and sonic identity” as associated totems.
What each of these touchstones present is a highly-stylised facsimile of unattainable girlhood, burned on a stake but remembered forever. A quarter century after the premiere of a film set another quarter century before that, The Virgin Suicides endures in its portrayal of adolescent desire and terror. An art object whose central critique is of the implicit violence wrought on the female body, its visuals were perhaps always going to exist apart from their far pricklier context. As it continues to age, find new audiences and accrue acclaim, the film only appreciates as a time capsule full of anachronism: a wholly uncondescending coming-of-age tale that asks us to believe what we see rather than what we’ve been told.
This article is taken from Port issue 36. To continue reading, buy the issue or subscribe head here
