When Cecilia Lisbon, the youngest of the five Lisbon daughters in Sofia Coppola’s film The Virgin Suicides, winds up in the hospital having survived an attempt on her own life, the doctor tells her: ‘You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.’ ‘Obviously, doctor,’ Cecilia replies, ‘you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl.’
The dark edge of adolescence runs through Sofia Coppola’s films. You get a sense from even the most playful and romantic scenes that, behind the lustre of expensive clothes or dappled sunlight, girlhood is tragic and that its transformations are traumatic. Coppola’s eye for these contrasts makes her films brilliant. It also, whether she intends it or not, gives us licence to indulge in our own ‘tragedies’ of girlhood as truly that: tragedies.
Coppola’s audiences identify themselves in her beautiful, longing heroines
Is being a 13-year-old girl really so tragic? I have been one, and yes, it was unbearable.
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