The Virgin Suicides

Herald rating: * * *

Cast: Kathleen Turner, James Woods, Kirsten Dunst, Josh Hartnett

Director: Sofia Coppola

Rating: R16 Running time: 98 mins

Screening: Village, Rialto, Berkeley.

Review: Gilbert Wong

A famous surname can be as much burden as boon.

Sofia Coppola's first directing effort has a lot to live up to. Father Francis Ford Coppola has at least two films which sit securely in the canon of Western cinema.

Like her dad, who took the genres of gangster and war movies and created classic depictions of the dark side of the American Dream, Sofia Coppola has selected the genre du jour - the teen angst flick - to direct a thoughtful meditation on the painful awkwardness of adolescence and the terrible mystery of teen suicide.

The five blond Lisbon sisters embody desire and feminine mystique for a group of neighbourhood boys.

As narrator Giovanni Ribisi, playing one of the boys as an adult, notes: "They knew everything about us. We could never fathom them."

One of the daughters, Cecilia (Hanna Hall), attempts suicide for no apparent reason. Danny De Vito, in a small role as a puzzled psychiatrist, proffers the hardly sage advice that Cecilia's attempt was a "cry for help."

She later succeeds in far more grisly fashion and that act throws the Lisbon nuclear family into an ever tighter spin.

Mrs Lisbon (Kathleen Turner) is a neurotic, religious woman whose response to her increasingly nubile daughters is steely control of their lives. Her husband (Woods in an engaging piece of counter-casting) is a meek, nerdy maths teacher, the lone Lisbon male flailing in a sea of domestic oestrogen.

Of the five daughters, Lux is the most fully developed, in both character and sexuality. Played by teen queen Kirsten Dunst, she is a fitting object of desire who - with a knowing smile - can leave her male classmates slack-jawed.

Coppola has reconstructed another black vision of repressed suburban banality that was the territory of American Beauty. As in that film, sudden grisly violence and indiscriminate and loveless sex lie behind a prim facade. And again, as in American Beauty, Coppola reveals an ironic knowing sensibility that takes the set pieces of B-movies and infuses them with black humour and satire without resorting to the easy laughs others have milked from our most embarrassing decade, the 70s.

This is best seen in the manner of Cecilia's demise and the hackle-raising television news reports. That Coppola is able to mix this with the frankly tragic material of teen suicide and budding sexuality shows a keen intelligence. This is a teen flick teens should see.