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As the old saying goes, “Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus.” These two different worlds are never meant to understand one another. So what would a movie be like that centers on women, told from a male’s point-of-view? You would get the wholly unique yet emotionally distant The Virgin Suicides. With bleak themes about as sexy as the title would lead you to believe, Suicides is closely adapted from the thought-to-be-unfilmable Jeffery Eugenides novel. The novel was actually a part of my high school’s independent reading curriculum due to its relate-ability, and while it wasn’t the book I choose (No Country for Old Men was my pick which was as excellent to read as well to watch), I was still curious to view the film version of it. The Netflix DVD picture of the beautiful Kirsten Dunst with an inviting smile sealed the deal. Researching the movie a bit before watching, it did not seem to be up my alley. While I enjoy heavy-handed drama, the themes seemed a bit female-centric. However, the very ingenious narrating device borrowed from the book was applied excellently and rested my fear.

Filled with as many metaphors as a little girl’s diary, The Virgin Suicides takes place in Michigan circa 1975 in a town that looks idyllic, but underneath the skin of the nicely groomed girls and boys that reside there are raging hormones that are never satiated. The film focuses on a group of neighborhood boys ranging in age presumably from 13 to 17, the same ages as the five blond and buxom Lisbon daughters they are obsessed with. However, what drives their obsession for the girls is their seemingly out of thin air suicides, an event for the boys that “changed them for life.” The peaceful outside and fractured inside spoof the same era portrayed by the robotic Stepford Wives for its conventions that ultimately lead to the last-word of the title. Playing out like a crime show with its story told backwards backwards, knowing the end at the beginning, you would expect to know more as you go along with intricate twists and turns. But there never is any real revelation and that is where the film left me in the dark, in addition to dividing critics and audiences alike.

The first suicide is of the youngest daughter, Cecilia, who has a failed attempt at the beginning of the film, slitting her wrists in the tub. When the psychiatrist asks Cecilia why, she snappily retorts, “Obviously, Doctor, you have never been a 13-year-old girl.” Displaying the film's infrequent bursts of dark humor, this is sadly about as much of an answer as we get. After Celia's death, the Lisbon’s strict Christian mother and father put the girls on a virtual house arrest, cutting off all outside communications and influences, which leads up to the suicide of the other four girls.

The real explanation comes from the mysterious male narrator, who I was led to assume was collective voice of the group of boys, trying to find a reason for the suicide. We see the boys spy on the girls from their next door window and steal from their garbage to try to find meaningful scraps to piece together what lead up to the suicides. However, nothing really is meaningful and maybe that is the whole point - that my gender is really oblivious to our female counterparts, so much so that the group of boys could not really even see the Lisbon girls slowly slipping away from them before ultimately going away. However, the lack of character detail makes the girls' actions not very mystical at all, but fairly trite and predictable.

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