Extra Geography – simmering inferiority complexes, co-dependency laced with envy and betrayal (QFT from Friday 2 October)

Flic and Minna are two best friends at a north of England boarding school, the kind of rural establishment where PE includes lacrosse. One comes from a privileged background (Minna played by Galaxie Clear), the other (Flic played by Marni Duggan) is a scholarship student with working class roots. They’re normally as thick as thieves and we join them as they begin to search for a new summer project. Classmates beware: their peers don’t always benefit from these side quests.

Extra Geography is set in simpler times and some suspension of disbelief is required. Mobile phones and social media aren’t available. The delights of the internet haven’t begun to sully all-too-young minds. The pair of 15-year-old BFFs are worried about not getting into Oxbridge. They think boys are horrid and adults are boring. They’re adolescents but still very naïve. Sex ed advice is provided by a girl from the year above.

Falling in love as a means to be more “worldly” becomes their self-appointed challenge: “I want to be as good at love as I am at maths”. At one level it’s almost a pre-pubescent fever dream, but the pair’s charisma and earnest striving towards their goal in the face of potential humiliation is quite endearing. (And the unspoken question of whether they’ll ultimately realise they could conceivably already be in love with each other is left hanging.)

Miriam Battye’s screenplay – adapted from Rose Tremain’s short story and directed by Molly Manners – digs into the girls’ anxieties, their craving of attention, and introduces a sense of competition to see how they will react.

One external threat to their joinedness-at-the-hip is a production of Midsummers Nights Dream (which is almost a tiresome go-to play to add drama within another drama). This device also adds a supply of boys (and their attitudes towards each other and women) from another school into the equation … though the girls’ summer project longings are aimed elsewhere. Casting decisions expand the wedge that has already been created by their shared object of desire.

Minna and Flic’s girlhood almost lives in its own bubble. We rarely see how other girls judge their crazy BNOC-lite behaviour. Classmate Phoebe (Aoife Riddell making her debut) is a consistent third wheel, the unknowing victim of a previous project who tries desperately hard to befriend the pair. Geography teacher Miss Delavigne (Alice Englert) becomes entwined in the ‘project’.

Girls’ boarding schools are ripe for rarefied cinematic studies of friendship, bad behaviour and lesbian activity. But this is no St Trinian’s. Minna and Flic’s bitchiness has limits. A US-produced version of this film would surely have sexed the whole thing up, ending with blood dripping down the dormitory walls? But Extra Geography settles for something more subtle with simmering inferiority complexes, co-dependency laced with envy, and a lip-trembling episode of betrayal as tiny molehills are made into mountains in the teenagers’ minds. The strong and unshowy performances make this all about friendship with feelings turned up to eleven.

Extra Geography opens today at Queen’s Film Theatre, and there’s a Q&A with local actor Aoife Riddell after this evening’s screening.

 

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