The dance itself, featuring a high school gym that's been halfheartedly transformed into a glumly festive forest by the simple hanging of a glitter curtain in front of the bleachers, captures perfectly those futilely hopeful school dances where the collective wish that something good would happen hangs in the air like a toxic cloud.

The forlorn hope of that dance is what makes it so moving: It's hilarious when Lux, her sister Therese (the charming Leslie Hayman) and their respective dates cluster behind that tinsel curtain to drink peach schnapps and make out. But it's still easy to see how they're hurtling themselves toward something, any old thing, that might change their lives. And when Therese beams at her date and says, "I'm having the best time," her utter sincerity is heartrending. Who ever had a good time at those things? But her simple declaration represents the way we always hoped against hope we would.

The music in "The Virgin Suicides" couldn't have been more perfectly chosen, not just for the way it evokes the era but for the way it builds subtle strata of moods: The homecoming dance, set to ELO's "Strange Magic" and 10CC's "I'm Not in Love," takes on a kind of swimmy surrealism. And it's a delicious joke when Trip first swaggers onto the scene to the tune of Heart's "Magic Man."

The picture's single loveliest sequence involves not just music but the magic of record albums. The girls, sequestered by their parents in their suburban prison, receive a signal from the boys who love them: Their phone rings, and when they answer, Todd Rundgren's "Hello It's Me" drifts through the receiver. The girls cluster around their hi-fi to send a song back, and the plaintive volley continues: Gilbert O'Sullivan's mopey "Alone Again (Naturally)" is countered by the Bee Gees' "Run to Me," which is followed by Carole King's "So Far Away," the songs' plaintive messages traversing the phone lines like lantern signals exchanged between lonely sailors.

The whole time, the narrative of "The Virgin Suicides" is leading up to a single mysterious act. Yet the story isn't a mystery at all, but simply the affirmation of a simple truth: That even if memories of the people we once loved (from afar or up-close) are embroidered and enhanced over time, that doesn't necessarily make them less valuable or less "true." In other words, disillusionment doesn't necessarily equal enlightenment. In "The Virgin Suicides," Michael Paré appears as the older Trip, skinny and decrepit-looking and wasting away in some bleak drug-rehab center (and still wearing the same ultra-fitted cowboy shirts). Paré's grown-up and burned-out Trip tells the story, in flashback, of what happened between him and Lux, and when he asserts that he never loved anyone as much, you've no choice but to believe him.

The older Trip is touching not because he's so down-and-out, but because in talking about Lux he's momentarily transformed. You see a glimmer of the stud he once was flash across his face; even his body language changes a bit. Trip never had the ability to see Lux as the woman she really was. Hanging onto his dream vision seems to have done nothing but suck the life out of him -- and yet you wonder, if he'd been able to thoroughly dismiss her memory, would he have just shriveled up and blown away completely?

Some readers (in my experience they were mostly women) were frustrated with Eugenides' book for the way it fixated on the men's view of the women instead of the women themselves. But "The Virgin Suicides" isn't simply about the way men can fall hopelessly in love with ideals; it's about how they can be ultimately undone by them, and Coppola understands that perfectly. She re-creates their vision for us in all its beauty, but she also suggests the holes in it -- the dark spots that dance in front of you when you've been stupid enough to stare directly at the sun.

She has compassion for those boys, but there's no doubt that her heart really goes out to those girls. Descending that staircase to greet their anxious dates, they weren't sorceresses or fairy queens or succubi. They were just young girls in bad dresses, waiting to be understood. Instead, they were simply loved.

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