The 1970s, a suburb in Michigan. The corset of norms and beliefs begins to tighten around the five Lisbon sisters. In their deeply religious household, the girls are accustomed to a strict order. Their mother is hysterical, intent on covering their bodies at all costs and making them indistinguishable, while their father, a mathematics teacher, would rather only speak of trivial things. When Therese, Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Cecilia start attracting boys’ attention, it isn’t merely the awakening of sexuality. Nor is it simply the rebellion of fair-haired, curl-fluttering girls against all that was known before. Neither is it denying their parents. Perhaps the infatuated boys – who will remember the sisters as long as they live – can tell us a little more?

As film critic Roger Ebert once said, it doesn’t matter what the Lisbon girls looked like – what matters is how they appeared to the teenage boys next door. Sofia Coppola’s feature debut is one of the most canonical coming-of-age dramas, helping to usher in a wave of American and European obsession with the search of young people told in film at the turn of the millennium. In this adaptation of the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, Coppola gives us a narrator who speaks on behalf of “all the boys who loved them”, ethereal, pastel-toned psychological and geographical landscapes, the melodic hypnosis of French band Air, and career-defining roles for Kirsten Dunst, Josh Hartnett, and many others. Coppola’s later work would continue to explore the experiences of young women – though in this piece, we often forget who the storyteller truly is, and in whose memory the Lisbon girls are buried.