I remember, when I watched this at the cinema, I thought that it was one of the saddest and truest things that I'd ever seen. (Hard to believe that it's been five years already.) Then, as now, I was well nigh overcome by the sharp sweet nostalgia which fills the film's every scene, a nostalgia that works on two levels: for a sort of hazy, collectively dreamt image of suburban America in the 70s, available even to those like myself who never lived through those years, AM radio, sunshine and shifting shadows, innocence and glitter, transience and loss; and for those awkward, inchoate, grace-touched teenage years which always, in retrospect, appear bathed in a strange transformative glow, light and heavy all at once, seemingly limitless potential mingled with a queer, lump-in-throat, ungraspable sense of what was always already passing.
I'm listening to the soundtrack now, wrapping myself for a little longer in the dreamy cocoon of The Virgin Suicides, and finding that I don't want to say much more. The film has retained its gentle glamour and its mystery, and I adored it all over again. It's like it never went away.
