On how Sofia Coppola's Virgin Suicides (1999) uses male perspective to talk about female subjectivity.

The Virgin Suicides is narrated by a group of men who, as teenagers, were obsessed with the Lisbon sisters. The narration is explicitly limited: these men, now adults, are still trying to understand what happened and why, and they cannot. The film makes their incomprehension its formal subject.

The girls are never given psychological interiority in the conventional film sense: we don't see their internal experience directly. We see them through the obsessive attention of boys who projected their fantasies onto them. This is the film's formal argument: the Lisbon sisters were consumed by a gaze that refused to see them as people rather than objects of desire and melancholy.

The visual language is correspondingly dreamy and distanced: the Lisbon house seen from outside, the girls framed in windows or at a remove, the world filtered through a specific soft-focus aesthetic that is beautiful and slightly unreal.

Coppola was twenty-seven when she made this. The control she demonstrates over the gap between what the narrators claim to know and what the film shows you is extraordinary for a first feature. The gap is where the film's meaning lives.