Sofia Coppola – “I didn't know I wanted to become a director…”

…until I read Virgin Suicides.” His first collaboration with Kirsten Dunst will be broadcast this evening on France 5.

She may be a nepo baby, daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, but Sofia Coppolathe director's latest baby Godfather, Apocalypse Now And Dracula, shone with his unique filmography which, in itself, was a series of successes. It all started with his first feature film, in 1999, at the dawn of the new millennium with Virgin Suicides. If at the time, Americans shunned the film, today it is the favorite of many spectators.

“Doctor, you were never a 13 year old girl.”

In the 1970s, in a bourgeois suburb, the five Lisbon sisters, tall beauties with golden hair, live in a gilded prison, educated in authority and religion. They are the object of the curiosity of five boys from high school, and it is through their story and their vision that the tragedy to come is retraced – the spark of which is ignited by the suicide of the youngest girl. Bonnie, Mary, Cecilia, Lux and Therese will try to get out and live, they will constantly have one foot in the family home under the inquisitive gaze of their mother.

It is the lives of adolescent girls, their dreams, their desires, their problems, that Sofia Coppola stages by adapting here, the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, written a few years earlier and which itself is inspired by a tragic news item: five sisters decide to end their lives for no known reason.

For the filmmaker who is just starting out, the book is a revelation. Looking back on his career in Sofia Coppola Archive 1999-2023, she admits that without him, she would certainly never have made films. In the introductory interview conducted by journalist Lynn Hirschberg, she confides:

“I didn't know I wanted to become a director until I read Virgin Suicides: I could clearly see how this could be staged.”

Also, Virgin Suicides launches not only the start of its activity, but also of its collaboration with its flagship actress – Kirsten Dunst.

“The first time I saw her was in Interview with a Vampire (1994). I was impressed. I wondered how this little blonde girl managed to have so much depth in her playing, when she was only nine years old, perhaps?

She plays Lux, one of the Lisbon sisters – the most rebellious, the most adventurous. She catches the eye of Trip Fontaine – played by the very young Josh Hartnett – the most popular boy in school. Their relationship will not be the escape she had hoped for… With Virgin Suicides and Kirsten Dunst follow Marie Antoinette (2006), The Bling Ring (2013), and The Prey (2017). While promoting their latest film reunion, the director praised her muse to the magazine She :

“Beyond her talent as an actress, Kirsten is an artist in whom I have absolute confidence. Over the years, we have become friends. She is a bit like my little sister, I have seen her grow up in my films “She knows my sensitivity, my humor. With her, there's no need to explain what I want.”

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Then, from Kirsten Dunst comes the whole panoply of these sweet, childish but complex female figures like Scarlett Johansson, Elle Fanning, Emma Watson. Sofia Coppola captures the teenager who becomes a woman in their home.

A true object of art, Virgin Suicides inscribes in stone the aestheticism of the filmmaker. Her magazine photography where everything is placed with harmony, her precise color palette, her camera focused on the image rather than the dialogue, but also her young female characters, and her analysis of adolescence, of the sorority. From there, his cinema can only speak to the spectators and reflect their past.

Nominated for the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Virgin Suicides marks the birth of the filmmaker, and it can therefore be discovered this evening on France 5, from 9:05 p.m., then in replay on the France.TV site.

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