"'Hello.

How are you?

Have you been all right?

through all those lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely nights?'

That's what I'd say.

I'd tell you everything

if you'd pick up that telephone."

- ELO "Telephone Line" (1976)

"The Virgin Suicides" is one of the most wondrous and profound statements on the mystery of womanhood to ever be filmed. It's marvel is the marvel of young boy, caught up in those first moments of puberty, trying desperately to figure out themselves and the opposite sex. Maybe not so surprisingly, it is directed by a female, Sophia Coppola.

The plot concerns a group of such young men who live through a terrible moment. The film touches on it almost immediately. Teen suicide. Set in the mid-70's, the film adeptly reminds us of how this issue was just becoming a concern in suburban America. It also astutely points out how ill-equipped we, as a society, were to deal with it and how we began, however clumsily, to understand that the best method to combat it was information. Knowledge.

But we were taking baby steps. We couldn't even begin to fathom the overwhelming emotional impact that this issue involves. We were lost little children. "The Virgin Suicides" springs from this. It details girl angst in a most beautiful and troubling yet subtle way. As we still struggle with this issue, the film doesn't have any answers. There are no bromides here. It simply exposes the theme. Discusses it. Opens our minds to it. And, perhaps, this is one of the most important things it can accomplish. It begins the verbalization again.

The film revolves around a quintet of sister, each a year apart, living in suburbia. When the youngest fails at an attempt at suicide, it opens up the whole community to begins grappling with this issue. The boys in the neighborhood, our tourguides through the story, begin to become engrossed with the mystery, a mystery of teenage despondency and of feminine mystique itself. Eventually, their interest leads them to the very heart of the truth itself: We cannot, as men, even begin to grasp such unknowns. There are no simple answers. There is no defining moment where we might have done something to stop the angst, to calm the troubled waters, of feminine anguish and disquietude. It swells up, like a tidal wave, and overpowers us before we even see the storm.

In it's discussion of teenage loneliness and social despondency, teen angst (there is no better word for it) and seeming reasonless melancholy, the film could have easily been about any teenager, male or female. It simple uses females as it's springboard to the ideas. And because, in many ways, this is the less discussed area of the issue, it becomes even more valuable.

Before you begin to think that this film is a pretentious and overwrought dramatic essay, let me assure you that it is not. It is anything but. The film has wonderful moments of simple reminiscence and storytelling. There are moments of perfection that are humorous, delightful and insightful. One of the best sequences in the film comes when the character of Trip Fontaine is introduced. Full of swagger and 70's suburban cool, Trip enters the scene while Heart's "Magic Man" overpowers the soundtrack. He walks down the high school halls with that exact braggadocio and (now amusing) suave that the cool boys in all of our high school used to exude. Trip Fontaine is a character that anyone who grew up in the 70's knows perfectly. He was that boy all the girls swooned over. (And some of us guys too). To underscore his arrival with the classic tune by Heart is nothing less than brilliant and cinematically revolutionary. Ms. Coppola takes this one step further when Heart's "Crazy on You" is used again in a scene involving Trip to underscore intense passion. The music of Heart is his signature. It will be difficult to ever hear either of these songs again without pondering the magical mysticism of Trip Fontaine's overwhelming masculine aura.

Another scene of profound beauty involves music. Trying to communicate with the sisters, who have been "imprisoned" by their mother in their suburban "castle," the boys decide to call them. Rather than talk to them, an almost impossibility due to shyness and teenage male trepidation, the boys play a pop song over the phone for the girls. The girls reply in kind. And soon an orgy of Top 40 tunes weaves it way through the scene. With this Ms. Coppola points out the formidable power of pop music in our lives in the 70's. Songs like "So Far Away" by Carole King are used to indicate the emotional immediacy of the moment and highlight the tremendous impact those songs had upon us. I don't think modern pop has the emotional pointedness of those ancient AM radio tunes. I can remember how important the songs "Everything I Own" by Bread and "Day After Day" by Badfinger were during my first crush. Ah, Tammy Grey. Sitting in my family kitchen, listening to our little radio and hearing those songs, I felt my heart soar into the realms of love and lust. I felt myself responding to the changes in my body and the changes in my attitudes towards girls. Those were magic moments. They all came flooding back during this scene of "The Virgin Suicides." I can think of no other film that more perfectly captures this defining moment in our lives. And the importance of music in it.

Another beautiful use of music is the soundtrack by Air. The French band that owes as much to Kraftwerk as it does to 80's pop, brings forth a perfect underscore of emotion and feeling here. A scene where star Kirsten Dunst shimmers in the sweet spring of nature, her golden hair glowing in the backlight of the sun, may look like a commercial for margarine from the Nixon era, but with the score by Air providing emotional resonance, it is lifted up to a moment of quintessential beauty. We understand this image. It speaks to the naturalistic and the inherent beauty of womanhood. It defines that mystique that is so important to the film in a crystalline cinematic moment.

The acting in the film is nothing short of perfection. Dunst's sorrowfulness and sexual powers overwhelm us. The actresses portraying her soft siblings surround her with even more of this feeling. The film oozes with it. They are lighter than air, more pure than the unmown hay, a encapsulated essence of young womanhood. The teenage males in the cast perform with that indelicate balance of emerging sexuality and naive coyness that exemplifies that age. Josh Hartnett's Trip Fontaine is nothing short of brilliance. He makes us starry-eyed as we remember the Trip Fontaine's of our past. Michael Pare's grown Trip erases those stellar anomalies just as easily as Hartnett evokes them.

And the real stars of the movie, the girl's misguided parents: James Woods and Kathleen Turner. This is the nucleus that holds the whole complex atom together. Wood's father, lost in this same sea of the unsolvable puzzle of femininity as the young boys here, is a warm but unfocused figure. (Unfocused in character, not in performance). His inability to stop the wheel that has been put in motion does not condemn his character, but rather makes us ache for him. We see that he isn't wrong, simply lost, simply dumbfounded unable to understand the events that are unfolding around him. Meanwhile Turner, who is one of my least favorite actresses, provides a staunch but real suburban matriarch. Religion plays a underlying part in the events that unspool in the film's climax, but Ms. Coppola, Woods and Turner, especially Turner, keep this motivation in check, keep it from becoming a "message," a negative, a condemnation. It is Turner's wonderful subtlety in the role that makes everything that happens in the finale so troubling. In the hands of someone else it could have become overwrought and wrong. Instead, again, with Turner, there is that idea of an unreachable enigma, something we think we should be able to place our hands on, to find and physically alter, and yet it disappears into the ether as soon as we think we are close. Turner's matriarch is that riddle. She is the last yet most important missing piece of the jigsaw. We cannot find it, cannot know what is shows, cannot see the full picture without it.

Ms. Coppola, like her father, has established herself as a creator of cinematic truth and dramatic tension with her first feature. But she seems far more adept at making film and story work, making it speak simply. "The Virgin Suicides" is one of the most perfect, gripping and disarming films to be released lately. It's emotional truths will devastate you.

Note:

Written by Ms. Coppola based on the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides.

Also with Danny Devito and Scott Glenn in small roles. Giovanni Ribisi narrates the film.

Ms. Coppola is married to actor/director Spike Jonze. Her cousins include Jason Schwartzman and Nick Cage.

The nepotism factor: The film is produced by her father and his Zoetrope company. Ms. Coppola's brother Roman acts as First Assistant Director.

Turner appeared in Francis Coppola's "Peggy Sue Got Married." Devito appeared in Coppola's "The Rainmaker." Glenn appeared in Coppola's "Apocalypse Now." Turner and Devito appeared together in "Romancing the Stone," "Jewel of the Nile" and "War of the Roses." Woods ands Devito worked on voicing Disney's "Hercules" together.

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