The young women had been confined to their home by their religious and conservative mother, a possible explanation for their disastrous action. The story is told from the collective point of view of five adolescent boys who had obsessed about their counterparts across the way and is narrated by Giovanni Ribisi, invisibly standing in for the quintet. Lux, who had been about the only girl in the school to ignore Trip, soon becomes his lover, until during one destructive night she commits an act that causes her mother to haul her entire brood out of the school, effectively putting them under house arrest for several weeks. Sofia Coppola, I think, has captured the vision of novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, which is that in this enigmatic existence of ours, some things just cannot be rationally explained. At that point we realize that no resolution is going to come from Coppola's screenplay, no facile conclusion will be reached.
Neat solutions are the stuff of commercial movies.
Kathleen Turner and James Woods perform out of character as the parents. But all the boys have a healthy interest in what the fair sex are like and take pleasure in peering through a telescope to observe the girls in their shower and, in a few instances, performing sexual acts on the roof of the Lisbon home. In another scene, some adults in the community are enjoying a cocktail party, giving us the erroneous impression that Coppola and Eugenides believe that a more accountable assembly would instead engage in group therapy sessions to try to understand the malady which has defiled the district. In the final analysis, we are deliberately and cleverly left hanging, as unsure of the causes of the alienation of these children as we were when we entered the theater. That, in no small measure, is what makes this an exceptional film.