Set in 1974, the story centres around a group of teenage boys and their fascination with five mysterious sisters known as the Lisbon girls in their final days.
The story begins with the attempted, and then successful, suicide of the youngest Lisbon, Cecilia who impales herself on a metal fence during a party that was intended to cheer her up after her first suicide attempt.
The family are left devastated and while the four remaining sisters, Therese, Mary, Bonnie and Lux (played perfectly by Kirsten Dunst) don't outwardly display the same self-destructive tendencies Cecilia showed, it is clear that their strict upbringing by their passive father and overly religious mother is a source of discontentment for them; most notably Lux, the youngest and easily least content of the remaining girls.
A glimmer of hope appears when Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett), the cocky high-school heartthrob falls in love with Lux, who ignores him at first, which makes him want her more. He asks her to the homecoming dance and her parents reluctantly agree but only if he can find dates for all of the sisters so that they can all go. There are, of course, no shortage of potential dates.
The evening goes well until Lux misses curfew because she is having sex with Trip on the football field. He loses interest in Lux immediately afterwards and abandons her, leaving her to make her way home the next morning by herself, causing the girls' parents to put them all on total lock down. They are taken out of school and withdrawn from the world almost entirely.
Feeling dreadful for the girls, the neighbourhood boys do what they can to help them feel connected to the world, such as playing song lyrics down the phone to each other and using flashing lights to communicate Morse code across the street.
The lock down seems to send Lux over the edge as she starts having sex with random boys on the roof of the house, much to the boy's amusement.
One evening the boys think their luck is in when the sisters invite them over after Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon are asleep, seemingly to go for a joyride or road trip. But when they arrive Lux appears to be in a melancholy mood. In reality, the sisters have each taken their life in a different way in a different room of the house and they just wanted the boys to witness it.
I must admit that I went into this movie biased towards liking it as years before viewing I had the ear candy that is the soundtrack composed by French duo, 'Air' that compliments the movie's dreamy, surreal tone perfectly.
No real reason or catalyst is ever given as to why the sisters feel that suicide is the only escape from their present reality and some feel that the movie glamourizes suicide (the movie is very beautiful), but I would argue that as the story is told through the eyes of a boy who idealises the girls, many years after the events of the movie took place, he is telling the story as he remembers it, not how things actually were.
The story begins with the attempted, and then successful, suicide of the youngest Lisbon, Cecilia who impales herself on a metal fence during a party that was intended to cheer her up after her first suicide attempt.
The family are left devastated and while the four remaining sisters, Therese, Mary, Bonnie and Lux (played perfectly by Kirsten Dunst) don't outwardly display the same self-destructive tendencies Cecilia showed, it is clear that their strict upbringing by their passive father and overly religious mother is a source of discontentment for them; most notably Lux, the youngest and easily least content of the remaining girls.
A glimmer of hope appears when Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett), the cocky high-school heartthrob falls in love with Lux, who ignores him at first, which makes him want her more. He asks her to the homecoming dance and her parents reluctantly agree but only if he can find dates for all of the sisters so that they can all go. There are, of course, no shortage of potential dates.
The evening goes well until Lux misses curfew because she is having sex with Trip on the football field. He loses interest in Lux immediately afterwards and abandons her, leaving her to make her way home the next morning by herself, causing the girls' parents to put them all on total lock down. They are taken out of school and withdrawn from the world almost entirely.
Feeling dreadful for the girls, the neighbourhood boys do what they can to help them feel connected to the world, such as playing song lyrics down the phone to each other and using flashing lights to communicate Morse code across the street.
The lock down seems to send Lux over the edge as she starts having sex with random boys on the roof of the house, much to the boy's amusement.
One evening the boys think their luck is in when the sisters invite them over after Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon are asleep, seemingly to go for a joyride or road trip. But when they arrive Lux appears to be in a melancholy mood. In reality, the sisters have each taken their life in a different way in a different room of the house and they just wanted the boys to witness it.
I must admit that I went into this movie biased towards liking it as years before viewing I had the ear candy that is the soundtrack composed by French duo, 'Air' that compliments the movie's dreamy, surreal tone perfectly.
No real reason or catalyst is ever given as to why the sisters feel that suicide is the only escape from their present reality and some feel that the movie glamourizes suicide (the movie is very beautiful), but I would argue that as the story is told through the eyes of a boy who idealises the girls, many years after the events of the movie took place, he is telling the story as he remembers it, not how things actually were.