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Marni Duggan as Flic and Galaxie Clear as Minna show plenty of promise in this girls-only public school coming-of-age comedy set in the north of England, a tale adapted from Rose Tremain's short story, directed by Mollie Manners - her first feature film.
The two Year 10 girls take best-friendness to the extreme. They sit together, share Oxbridge aspirations, play the same sports (lacrosse, of course), eat the same food, and even contrive to finish their classroom tasks with perfect synchronicity.
Inevitably, adolescent angst is a wedge that separates. The girls have to undertake a summer project. Their self-chosen task is to fall in love with their geography teacher, Miss Delavigne (Alice Englert) – the project stemming from their reading of a A Midsummer Night’s Dream; more specifically, Bottom the Weaver’s fate to fall in love with the first person he sets eyes upon, having awakened from his potion-induced sleep with the head of an ass.
So the geography teacher seduction plot is interwoven with the tribulations of Titania, Bottom and Oberon. The girls have auditioned for the school play, in which, horror or joy, boys from the nearby local school will take part. Minna gets the top part of Titania while Flic, the better actor, is landed with the role of tree/mound. Not for the last time in this tale, Flic is faced with the painful truth that, when it comes to being picked for the job, the good lookers, not the gifted, get selected.
So far, so good. Witty, sharply observed, mild, mildly amusing, well scripted.
There’s a 'but' coming… and it’s in the plot development, as the story takes a darker turn and the focus leans more towards Flic than her bestie. The quality acting continues, but the story is painfully slow and sadly, for a film that is so good on observing the agonies of teenage self-awareness, it fails to convince at crucial points in the narrative. There is also an overdependence on repeated establishing shots, and the device of labelling the sections into Act One… to Act Five is as much a cliché as that of a short story writer weaving scenes from a well-known Shakespeare comedy into a limpingly dull, too slow tale from a posh northern school.
Some short stories, such as Philip K Dick’s 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' make for top quality feature film material. This one doesn’t.
The girls who play the lead parts may become stars – they need better material than this for their talents.
