The friendship of boarding-school students Minna (Galaxie Clear) and Flic (Marni Duggan) is dramatically tested when they embark on a summer project to fall in love.
The Charli XCX lyric, “It’s so confusing sometimes to be a girl,” is a perfect descriptor for the core ethos of Molly Manners’ charmingly offbeat directorial debut. Focusing on the graduation from girlhood to womanhood, Extra Geography joins the growing canon of British films that take teenage girlhood seriously, like Rocks and Last Swim, but Manners’ film offers a fresh take on friends growing up and apart.
Based on Rose Tremain’s 2007 short story, Succession writer Miriam Battye opens the film with confident Minna (Galaxie Clear) and timid Flic (Marni Duggan) lying on the lacrosse field worrying about their future and Oxbridge applications. With no boys, drugs or part-time jobs to distract them from their studies, their main concern is to become more “worldly” with a simple summer project: to fall in love. The subject of their experiment turns out to be their flustered geography teacher, Miss Delavigne (Alice Englert).
The commanding performances of Galaxie Clear and Marni Duggan are the real triumph here.
However, this endeavour divides the girls for the first time. A production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream steals Minna’s focus: she’s Fairy Queen Titania and hangs out with boys from a neighbouring school, while Flic is cast as a tree, and so she dives into studying love as an academic pursuit. Jealousy wedges itself between them and their friendship starts to wilt. Mirroring the Shakespeare play, Extra Geography takes on a five-act structure, but the film’s balancing act of several narrative threads unfortunately becomes tangled as its razor-sharp bite isn’t sustained across the full 94 minutes.
While Manners and Battye deserve credit for their deft handling of teen angst with brooding desires and snappy comedic one-liners, the commanding performances of Clear and Duggan are the real triumph here. This formative, symbiotic friendship is beautifully lived-in, with the fresh-faced actors capturing the ugly, strange and impulsive reality of teenage girlhood.
This oddly endearing coming-of-age drama is contained to the isolated boarding school, which serves as a well-lit dollhouse for them to roam, suspended in time and place. Though this creates some beguilling visuals, the film’s handling of class (Minna holidaying in Lanzarote while Flic is reminded she’s on a scholarship) and emerging queer sexuality (hints at sapphic longing permeate dreamy frames) raises interesting ideas but falls short at grappling with the nuances of it all. What prevails, though, is an original and painfully accurate portrait of first love being your best friend.
A confident debut. Though some areas are lightly sketched, the riveting performances from two promising newcomers are deserving of a pass with merit.
