Jeffrey Eugenides' novel "The Virgin Suicides," set in 1970s suburbia, is a creamy, moonbeam-laden love letter to the girls of the day, in their French-cut T-shirts, bell-bottoms and Love's Baby Soft. It's a tender and beautifully written book, one that makes the case once and for all that boys can be a sentimental and perceptive lot, but there's one big problem with it: It's so obsessively detailed that by the end it's almost unreadable.

The book's narrators are a group of boys who've grown into men, but who can't leave their memories of five neighborhood girls, the Lisbon sisters, behind them. If all boys had as many exposed nerve endings as they seem to, we'd live in a world with no skyscrapers and no bridges.

Leave it to a woman to boil all the excess, leaden moisture out of Eugenides' book and leave just the bare-bones poetry. Sofia Coppola's adaptation of "The Virgin Suicides" -- it's her directorial debut, and she also adapted the screenplay -- captures the loveliest visuals and bits of language from Eugenides' book and faithfully, but not slavishly, transfers them to the screen. There's no irony in Coppola's treatment; she nabs all of the book's humor without layering on too many smirks or ironic winks. She connects with the essential purity of Eugenides' story, stripping it down to its bare essentials and cutting straight to everything that's wonderful about it. It's a movie adaptation that's filled with love.

That's not to say that if a man had made "The Virgin Suicides" it would have been a worse movie, but it's safe to assume it would have been a rather different one. I've never been one for ghettoizing, and certainly not canonizing, female artists; it always seemed to me a better idea to look at a work, as much as is humanly possible, for what it is rather than to fixate on what's between the legs of the person who made it.

But there's no denying that men and women bring different sensibilities to their work. And you can't ignore the unusually large number of high-profile pictures made by female directors in the past year or so, among them Kimberly Peirce's "Boys Don't Cry," Mary Harron's "American Psycho" and Bonnie Hunt's "Return to Me," as well as "The Virgin Suicides."

What's always frustrating about the trumpeting of "hot" new female directors is that, as always, the ones who get all the attention haven't necessarily made the best movies. Stacy Cochran is a case in point. Her wry 1992 suburban fairy tale, "My New Gun," made barely a blip on the radar screen, and her next feature, the more delicate and subtly shaded "Boys" (1996), was misunderstood by most of the critics who saw it and went unseen by just about everyone else. Cochran presented a film at Sundance this year that has yet to find a distributor.

There's also a tendency to overlook female filmmakers working in other countries, some of whom have been making subtly terrific movies for years: New Zealander Jane Campion earned lots of attention in 1993 for "The Piano," a foolish if visually lush movie that tapped into the feminist zeitgeist of its time. The success of "The Piano" was treated as some sort of signal that female directors had at last "broken through" -- though through to what, I'm not exactly sure -- and I would have been thrilled if its popularity could have ensured greater international success (or at least attention) in subsequent years for filmmakers like Great Britain's Carine Adler ("Under the Skin"); France's Claire Denis ("I Can't Sleep," "Beau Travail") or Catherine Breillat ("Romance"); or Canada's Lea Pool ("Set Me Free").

The point is, even though it's hard not to notice when a clutch of female filmmakers suddenly appear on the scene, it's never a good idea to lump them into a group that's defined by some broad women's view. But there's nothing wrong with admitting that women are likely to view things differently from the way men do.

Look at Denis' "Beau Travail," an adaptation of Melville's "Billy Budd" set in the Foreign Legion. On its most basic level, "Beau Travail" is a paean to the beauty of men's bodies. But even when Denis, with the help of her terrific cinematographer, Agnes Godard, shows us rippling muscles and sweat-dappled skin, the images are distinctly different from what you might see in gay porn. Denis doesn't sentimentalize or declaw the male form -- she revels in its supple, tigerlike qualities -- but she does view it with a certain amount of tender regard, tacitly acknowledging that there's always a fragility to that shell of skin and bone and muscle, regardless of whether it belongs to a man or a woman.

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