Sofia Coppola’s directorial debut traces the lives and deaths of the five adolescent Lisbon sisters who are the intense focus of a group of neighborhood boys who study and idolize them, but rarely interact with the girls. The film’s meticulous recreation of a 1970s suburban vision of girlhood—lace and ribbons, secret diaries, vinyl records, carpeted staircases—helps to create their dreamy, if doomed, waking life that gradually ferments within the ultra-strict parameters set by their religious parents.

Jeffrey Eugenides, who wrote the book the screenplay was based on, said that he conceived of the girls not really as individual people, but more as a collective entity, and critiqued the film for its focus on their individuated personalities. At the film’s heart, however, neither the girls being observed nor the boys watching them function as individuals so much as two multi-faceted singular consciousnesses, fascinated by yet fundamentally divided from one another—echoing the very experience of the cinema audience.