Extra Geography movie review
Cast: Marni Duggan, Galaxie Clear, Alice Englert, Aoife Riddell
Director: Molly Manners
Star rating: ★★★★★
All of us have lived it, and yet there is nothing as definitive about the experience of growing up in a school: making friends, thinking they would last forever, and hoping desperately that we would become adults soon. It is a singular experience, yet we have all been there, craving for the attention of that one teacher we have a crush on.
Molly Manners’ delightful and gently moving coming-of-age dramedy Extra Geography grapples with the pressures and anxieties at an English girls’ boarding school, where two best friends stick to one another and do all sorts of things they think would lead them to finding love. Turns out, Shakespeare did not have much of a clue either, so how can these girls know better?
The premise
Here we are with Minna and Flic (played by first-time actors Galaxie Clear and Marni Duggan), who are completely in sync with one another. They sit beside each other in class, open their notebooks together, eat lunch, go back to their dorm rooms and most importantly, share the common apathy for boys. Eww, boys! Adapted from Rose Tremain’s short story of the same name by Succession writer Miriam Battye, these early scenes are established with wonderful authenticity and style, which might remind viewers of Lady Bird. But this is a film laced with that sly British humour and walks forward with a radiant degree of wistfulness even when the gaze stays firmly on the experiences of these two girls.
Minna decides it would be a good idea to fall in love first; maybe that can be a real experience they can share over the summer. Who better than the soft-spoken Geography teacher Miss Delavigne (Alice Englert)? However, their easy plan faces a major impediment with the announcement of the co-ed summer play, for which the girls need to audition. It is Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play filled with donkeys and other animals, as Flic describes with disdain. They must stick together through it all, even as their friendship is tested rather unassumingly along the way.
What works
Hilarious and utterly refreshing in its tone, Extra Geography is a gift of a film. You know, as a viewer, that you are watching something special even as it unfolds in real time, such is its radiance and vivacity. Manners expertly captures the idiosyncrasies and disappointments, the little acts of cruelty that hurt the most because they are coming from that close friend who has known us forever.
Extra Geography is filled with humour, but the main reason it works is that Manners never derives the laughs at the cost of her protagonists. We never laugh at them; at times, we feel a tinge of embarrassment and always stay close, like a guardian force. Joe Randall-Cutler’s editing is also one of its strongest assets, where the scenes flow organically even as the bittersweet lessons along the way pile on. There is not a single false note in it.
Galaxie Clear and Marni Duggan give two flat-out wonderful performances as Minna and Flic, carving out their characters’ own personalities as the film merrily progresses. Mannners’ filmmaking is confident and alive, infused with a wisdom that makes Extra Geography one of those films you watch once and feel every pulse underneath it. Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, it is an instant coming-of-age triumph. I am glad a film like this exists.
Santanu Das is covering the Sundance Film Festival as part of the accredited press.
