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Anything to do with the Lisbon sisters becomes a group activity for the boys. "Collecting everything we could of theirs, the Lisbon girls wouldn't leave our minds." Given how much is thrown out, the boys amass enough of their belongings to start a Lisbon Sisters Museum, going through them as if solving a Rubik's cube. They obtain Cecilia's diary and read it together, like it's a revelation to them about what it must be like being a teenage girl. They even watch Lux having sex on the roof of her house (going so far as to ready popcorn for the next Lux event). Essentially they're stuck watching and reading the fantasy, imagining themselves on far away trips with the girls, since they're unable to spend time with the real thing. But part of that comes down to the girls being confined, rarely getting the chance to be who they want to be.

The film finds many ways to say that the male of the species will never understand teenage girls. Yet, the Lisbon sisters seem to have men sussed out pretty easily, toying with them (and to be incredibly biased, most of them aren't that hard to work out). It helps explain the final act, reinforcing how the boys are so preoccupied in their own fantasies of the Lisbon sisters that they fail to realise that the girls are slowly fading away in front of them. They knew so much about them, but ultimately didn't really know who they were at all. Amid the tension, Coppola adapts from the book a shared "knowledge" that the boys will soon drive the girls out of the neighborhood. On film, the scene becomes cruel situational irony upon the audience.

When released, some critics didn't approve the lack of answers; that it was strange and lacked any distinct point. Even while watching, I had to ask myself, "What the hell is this film about, if anything at all?" It was a while after those credits rolled when the realization came that it may not explain the great big why, but then that's EXACTLY the point. The Virgin Suicides is not based on a true story, but one could believe that the events in this film happened. If we read about it in a newspaper most of us would rarely think twice about it and move on with our lives. The film takes us so deep into the Lisbon family that all of a sudden we want answers to questions we would never have cared to think about, as the viewer is made to feel just like the neighborhood boys.

Playing the major festivals (premiering at Cannes), the film garnered praise from critics. It opened in the US in April 2000, but on limited release (probably down to keeping the word "suicide" in the title, which is never a good sign). The low box office returns still resulted in a tiny profit against its $6 million budget. Coppola went on to write and direct the seminal Lost in Translation (bagging an Oscar for Best Screenplay) and worked with Dunst once again for Marie Antoinette.

The Virgin Suicides is a bittersweet pill to swallow and won't be for everyone. But for people who allow it to transcend from the screen to their inner emotions, it might even make them consider the possibility that maybe they know (or knew) someone like the Lisbon sisters. How will they feel then?

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