97 mins.; 1.85:1; colour; language: English
At Wikipedia, IMDb (7.2), Metacritic (76)
A group of men remember the events that transformed their lives forever, and not for the better: Back in their youths, in a 1970s US suburb, there were five unattainable girls, and they killed themselves.
The film starts with a suicide attempt by the youngest one, Celia, and once she succeeds, the girls' parents isolate their daughters even more than they had before. Later, after the girls have broken a curfew, they'll take them out of school. The unattainability, of course, only heightens the boys' fascination with them. And that's what the film is about: Despite the film's title (identical to that of Jeffrey Eugenides' novel it's based on), the film is not so much about the five sisters but about the boys' fascination with them, or, to be more precise: their memories of their fascination with them. "Some readers (in my experience they were mostly women) were frustrated with Eugenides' book for the way it fixated on the men's view of the women instead of the women themselves," writes Stephanie Zacharek. The film does not change this focus. Complaining about it is a little like complaining that Einstein made no contributions to the theory of evolution. The 95% of the film that are set in the 1970s should be seen not as a depiction of reality, I think, but rather as a depiction of rememberance.
That interpretation is certainly fueled by the film's atmosphere: Drenched in pastel and accompanied by the ambient music of brilliantly chosen collaborators Air, the movie's positively dream-like, seeming at times to be set underwater. I've seen a thousand pictures set in American suburbs, but none of them made them look like a world apart. This one does.
In the film's most impressive sequence, we learn that one of the young men finally attains what he desires, and that it fucks up his life forever. Take heed, o young ones!
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