I never went to an all-girls school, and certainly not a boarding school. I did, however, attend a girls’ summer camp for one month every summer from the ages of 10 to 17. From my experience there (an overwhelmingly positive one, I should clarify), I think I can extrapolate an understanding of the even more insular world of the year-round boarding school. Friendships in isolation accelerate at a faster clip and to a much deeper degree than out in the “real world.” Yet this setting can also intensify an adolescent girl’s worst impulses. The desire to fit in, the distaste for the unfamiliar and an underdeveloped sense of empathy is a noxious combination that, when multiplied across a group, can mutate into a mob mentality. There will always be girls who get hurt, and girls who look back later in disbelief, disturbed at their own indifference and cruelty.
The girls’ boarding school in Cracks is steeped in this atmosphere of intensely polarized emotion. The film starts as a British take on Mädchen in Uniform, the story of a relationship between a beloved teacher and her female students that, in a least one case, may be more than strictly pedagogical. Di Radfield (Juno Temple) is the captain of the diving team and the favorite student of Miss G (Eva Green). At confession, Di admits to “lustful thoughts” about the gardener’s son, but he’s clearly not the only object of her desire. With her smoky-eyed Continental looks and her tales of exotic travels, Miss G is not just an engaging teacher and an attractive role model. She represents the world outside the boarding school and all the promise it holds for her students.
With the arrival of Spanish student Fiamma (Maria Valverde), though, the group’s idyllic existence begins to splinter. The girls are simultaneously fascinated by and jealous of this aristocratic foreigner with a mysterious (and, they imagine, romantic) past. After Fiamma’s elegant somersault pike at her first practice, Di no longer “sets the standard” in diving, and Miss G’s attentions begin to drift toward the new girl. Di, fearful of losing her place within the group, begins lashing out at Fiamma and enlists the other girls to do the same. Meanwhile, Fiamma, unsettled by Miss G’s fascination with her, rebuffs the teacher’s gifts and attention. She is the only student worldly enough to see through Miss G’s bohemian airs and adventure stories as fantasy, and to identify her impulsiveness and intense attachment to her students as something more sinister. The teacher, for her part, recognizes Fiamma as the sophisticate she only pretends to be. “You’re not like the other girls; they’re still waiting for their lives to begin,” Miss G tells her student, though she herself is just as inexperienced. The teacher can relate so well to her students because her emotions are also stalled in adolescence. Miss G desperately sacrifices everything just for her crush to notice her. When she doesn’t reciprocate … well, “cracks” is as much a verb as it is a noun.
Cracks is bound to draw comparisons with Lord of the Flies, although the underlying message is actually quite different. No matter how cruelly the girls treat Fiamma, their bullying comes from a place of petulance and insecurity. Only an adult, the film reminds us, has the capacity for true evil. The final act pushes this theme to almost absurd extremes, but director Jordan Scott never shatters the film’s dreamy yet troubled ambiance. Scott lavishes care on slow-motion shots of the girls diving through the air or dancing together at a secret midnight party, scenes that relax the escalating tension while simultaneously emphasizing the girls’ uneasy intermediacy between childhood and maturity. While (hopefully) few female viewers can relate directly to Cracks’s extreme plot, many more will recognize their own adolescence, refracted as through a shattered glass.
Cracks opens in theaters March 18.
Look, Sally, Look 