How Air made the perfect score for Sofia Coppola’s ‘The Virgin Suicides’
At the beginning of The Virgin Suicides, the young Cecilia sits in her hospital bed after attempting to kill herself. When the doctor asks her, “What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets,” she responds with, “Obviously doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl.” As melodramatic as this may seem, Sofia Coppola‘s film perfectly encapsulates just how truly difficult this transitional period – from childhood to adolescence (the last stop before adulthood) – can be for girl.
Released in 1999, the movie follows the five Lisbon sisters as they deal with the tyranny of their increasingly oppressive and conservative parents, all while the neighbourhood boys become fascinated by them, seeing them as nothing more than gorgeous objects.
To go with the film’s dreamy imagery and its mixture of beauty and tragedy, Coppola requested an original score from the French band Air, the perfect accompaniment to her iconic debut feature. Air released their first album, Moon Safari, in 1998, and it has since become a classic electronic record – sophisticated, dreamlike, and sexy. The album was on repeat as Coppola worked on The Virgin Suicides, leading her to add the song ‘Ce matin la’ to the soundtrack.
When she approached the duo, not only to use the song, but also to record a whole score, they agreed, inadvertently creating one of their greatest songs in the form of the gorgeously haunting ‘Playground Love’, with vocals from Phoenix’s Thomas Mars. An interesting side note – Coppola and Mars, who met on set, would go on to marry in 2011 and have two children. The song opens the soundtrack album with several taps of the drumsticks before a bass note swells and gives way to gentle keys and cinematic synths, engulfing the listener in an evocative sense of mystery, romance, and something distant, tragic.
Discussing the record with Stereogum, Jean-Benoît Dunckel revealed, “It was something we made really fast and really quick,” adding, “We didn’t think about the impact of some of the tracks. We just did it really quickly, and it worked really well. It changed everything for Air.”
He also explained how “the first rushes we saw were really dark and deep, so we began by making very moody stuff, music that was like stepping out between light into something quite dark.” Yet, as the movie evolved, the band found more space for dreamier and romantic pieces. “So we made ‘Playground Love.’ The movie became more about love, and a love story between teenagers, and suicide, actually.”
While the movie is certainly very dark and depressing, Coppola allows plenty of gentle humour, playfulness, and unapologetically girlish and feminine elements to seep through, so the record strikes a fine balance between these moments. Dunckel shared how Air wanted the soundtrack to stand strong as its own cohesive album – one that was “inspired by the movie” but could also be listened to as a separate entity. They certainly achieved this, regularly playing tracks like ‘Highschool Lover’ and sometimes even ‘Playground Love’ during live sets.
On ‘Bathroom Girl’, Air evoke the feeling of driving away from a tragedy, looking back through the car window at a crash, perhaps, and knowing that the image you’ve seen will never leave your mind. With ‘Dark Messages’, a few tracks later, a minimal palette gives the feeling of exploring uncertain territory, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole into a world of confusion and darkness. With each track, the band experiments with samples from the film, romantic synths, smatterings of chaotic keys (‘The Word Hurricane’ is a standout here), or emotive electric guitars.
‘Empty House’ is another highlight, with a real sense of despair and pain threaded through the electronic palette, with its repetitive drum beats and a whirring synth that mirrors an eerie operatic female voice. The album reaches its desperate peak on the fast-paced penultimate track, ‘Dead Bodies’, conjuring the image of running away, fast this time, encapsulating the horrors of the film with a glorious, almost euphoric, sensibility.
Air’s soundtrack couldn’t be better suited for Coppola’s film, which communicates a melancholic, ultimately tragic and insular world for these five sisters. Excellently capturing the dichotomy of beauty, romance, innocence, and femininity with suffering, depression, oppressiveness, and death, the score is one of Air’s finest achievements.
