Set in an English girls’ boarding school, two teenage best friends grapple with the challenges of girlhood - friendship, boys, studies, and growing up - and embark on their summer project, falling in love.
The Garden Cinema View:
A fun, zippy, and occasionally quite sad, debut from Molly Manners who captures some essential truths of the psychodrama that is the English public school system.
In the tradition of the best boarding school films, St Jude’s is its own ecosystem, and for the all-girl student body it also demarcates the limits of their world – beyond an abstract idea of eventual study at ‘Oxbridge’. Manners and writer Miriam Battye use this quasi-cloistered setting to explore the intensity of female teenage friendship and co-dependency. Marni Duggan and Galaxie Clear are excellent discoveries as Flic and Minna, fleshing out a relationship dynamic reminiscent of Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, albeit a little less dark and a little more Booksmart.
Beyond the central pair, the supporting cast are quite a broad and typical bunch, representative of a wider debt to 90s and 00s teen comedies. And as with the b-grade 2001 high school movie Get Over It, a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is central to the plot. But Extra Geography is a good deal snappier than such a comparison suggests. Dialogue is layered and baroque (more akin to Whit Stillman’s Damsels in Distress than American Pie), and the production design may well evoke a tingle of fear as you find yourself dragged back to your own schooldays.
