Director: Molly Manners
Stars: Marni Duggan, Galaxie Clear, Alice Englert
An era-elusive British coming-of-age comedy that chronicles the misadventures of two booksmart Year 10 girls at a single-sex boarding school, who decide to approach the subject of love as an academic exercise… Extra Geography at least embraces its manifest destiny by including a Belle & Sebastian song (“Wrapped Up in Books” no less) on its jukebox soundtrack. Molly Manners’ feature debut, based on a short story by Rose Tremain, is like a song from the fey Scottish indie band’s early catalogue made flesh, replete with all the funny asides and introspective longing.
“Did you just long?” Flic (Marni Duggan) asks her bestie Minna (Galaxie Clear) as they research romance, reading such genre staples as Wuthering Heights and Angus, Thongs & Perfect Snogging (Manners acknowledging the classics). The girls’ awkward, scholarly approach to the next stage of their development speaks to a particularly modern nervousness about human interaction, as well as the outsized pressures of growing up and deciding your place in the world. Detached from familial bonds and plonked in this model of XX academia, Flic and Minna have found solace in one another’s sympatico strangeness. They move in learned co-ordination, and in its early stretches Extra Geography can feel like a forerunner for Werner Herzog’s upcoming Bucking Fastard; a tale of two girls chronically in sync and indistinguishable from one another.
But part of growing up is discovering one’s individuality, forging one’s own identity. And so the natural trajectory of Manners’ five act play is to document how these two inevitably grow apart. Having decided that their next extra-curricular project should be to fall in love, both girls zero in on their Kiwi geography teacher Miss Delavigne (Alice Englert) as the obscure object of their manufactured desire (and aren’t all crushes ultimately fashioned intentionally?). At first their very competitiveness for Miss Delavigne’s oblivious attention threatens to be the cause of their disunity, but ultimately their innate differences begin revealing themselves when Minna is chosen for a key role in the school’s production of A Midsommer Night’s Dream and Flic is not.
While the girls may have mustered greater security operating as a singular unit, doing so denies their inherent strengths and weaknesses. Discovering these separately proves to be a fraught experience for Flic, whom the film ultimately foregrounds. Through her we feel the pangs of watching your former bestie slowly disappearing into other circles. Flic disastrously funnels this sense of loss into her building infatuation with Miss Delavigne. Minna becomes less and less known to us. Because the play has allowed boys into the mix, we get Flic’s myopic perspective that this is the central distraction that has torn Minna away from her. This despite Minna repeatedly telling her that there’s “a lot going on”. Extra Geography aches with the self-centredness of adolescence. The inclination to make your own pile of pities the centre of a melodramatic universe.
Manners presents the material in the language expected of a school-set rites of passage comedy. It’s bright and cheery, performance focused, fizzing with the puckish energy of particularly British childhood. One element Manners absolutely nails is the clumsiness of furtive sexual interactions at this age, when neither boys nor girls know particularly what they’re doing as they rush to their adulthood, imitating the assumed actions of grown-ups without the requisite information and experience to fulfil their uncertain needs. It’s all very uncomfortable. Manners and the cast eke plenty of cringe-comedy out of these passages. Those of school age may wriggle in their seats from being seen. Those older will recognise all too well the embarrassments they once suffered through.
Duggan and Clear have evidently had the space and coaching required to get supremely comfortable with one another, and both seem like lucky finds for Manners. By virtue of the story skewing in her favour, it is Duggan who is afforded the opportunity to shine brightest, burrowing into Flic’s bodily awkwardness. Clear, for her part, channels some of the unshowy ennui of the Lisbon girls from Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides into Minna. A placid, inscrutable exterior that might just be roiling under the surface. Both girls appear to be navigating pained evolutions, and while the material frames this in such a manner that allows us to laugh, Manners doesn’t cheat when it comes down to her bittersweet but truthful curtain call. She bypasses the feel good in favour of the melancholy truth.
