Overly strict parenting, and a penchant for the dramatic?

@Halberstram said:

Overly strict parenting, and a penchant for the dramatic?

I just don't know how to feel about this movie. It's good, frivolous, and effed up at the same time. Especially for a supporter of 1-800-SUICIDE / www.hopeline.com ya know?

I love this movie and read the book. It's tragic but you feel for the girls. It definitely sucks you in!

I forgot about this film, only remembered it when I watched Mustang. Quite similar , check it out if you haven't seen it.

@lmao7 said:

I forgot about this film, only remembered it when I watched Mustang. Quite similar , check it out if you haven't seen it.

Thanks for the recommendation!!

Just saw this movie and was blown away. I think the answer to the question "why" is deliberately tangled. As if the point is to say the reasons for suicide are way too complex to sum up in a tagline. Or a 90 min movie. Or a 25 year mystery (of our confused narrator). And that's exactly why I was blown away. This is one of the earliest movies to treat the complexity of the suicidal mind, and the adolescent female psyche, as more than a gimmick or a plot device.

There's a brilliant line early in the flick that sums it up when Danny Devito tells Cecelia she doesn't have any reason to kill herself because she's just a kid. She answers, "You've obviously never been a 13 year old girl."

What's great is that the movie doesn't just cop out with an answer of "nobody knows". It's strongly implied that there are specific reasons, but we (like the narrator) just haven't pieced it together yet. I haven't read the book, but I'm sure it takes the same approach since it's told from an outsider's point of view. There are deliberate gaps of information. Althought the movie is about the girls, the camera doesn't really follow them except through the narrator's subjective imagination. We barely get to know the girls because they're shuttered in their house, and that's the point. How can you presume to know what's going on in someone's head if you never get close?

There are obvious elements of imprisonment and emotional abuse by their ultra conservative mother. Notice how towards the end even the father goes batty and starts talking to plants in public, he's powerless. The mother is the antagonist here. But it's more than that. Obviously the creep Trip had a lot to do with it. Nobody ever bothers to talk to the girls, the boys just ogle them. Then there are little things like their powerlessness to save the tree from the municipal authorities... Their defiant protest still ends with a tree stump at the end. And finally there's that hilarious satire of the news media, sort of a brilliant Veerhovenesque touch (Robocop, Starship Troopers), showing how society itself is the problem for making a carnival of these serious issues.

The bottom line is that this is a coming of age film about adolescents waking up to a brutal reality, but rather than ending with nostalgic acceptance of loss, it ends a lot darker. When innocence ends, literally so does life.