Extra Geography, Edinburgh International Film Festival, three stars

Jackson and Morley both bring an outsider’s eye to the subject, Jackson because he’s male and Morley because she’s working class and state educated. In Extra Geography, director Molly Manners plays the insider card by basing her film on an autobiographical short story by Rose Tremain, an alumni of the kind of educational institution where lacrosse was non-negotiable and a tilt at Oxbridge not just encouraged but expected.

We’re somewhere in the north of England, in a grand, solid pile set in a lush landscape. Flic (Marni Duggan) is the smart but uneasy scholarship girl with the regional accent. Best friend Minna (Galaxie Clear) is prettier and posher and therefore more assured.

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The plot turns on the choice of the annual school play, a joint production with the local boys’ school. It is to be A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. Though unimpressed by the verse, Flic and Minna decide to mimic the plot by trying to fall in love with the first person they see after they open their eyes in the lunch hall one day. This turns out to be awkward geography teacher Miss Delavigne (Alice Englert, daughter of Australian auteur Jane Campion and star alongside Elle Fanning of Ginger & Rosa, Campion’s 2012 coming-of-age film about two BFFs). In a flower-carrying pincer movement they stalk their prey, with somewhat inevitable consequences. Safe-guarding in schools is a live issue so playing it for laughs – or at the very least for dramatic effect – feels out of keeping with the rest of the film. A rare bum note.

Perhaps in order to stay in tune with the mood of Flic and Minna’s bubble world, there’s a pointed quality of timelessness throughout the film. There are no smartphones or laptops, so presumably no social media for the girls to gawp at. Library work is done from tattered text books. And there is no diegetic music to place the era either, though we hear Glasgow band Belle And Sebastian on the soundtrack at one point. Are we in the 1990s, the pre-smartphone Noughties or in some artfully presented modern day? Tremain’s short was written in 2007, while her own days at a girls’ boarding school were in the late 1950s.

Elsewhere Manners’ direction shows a keen eye for composition. She often films Flic and Minna sitting in adjacent toilet or shower cubicles, say, with only their feet showing, or framed geometrically with a dividing line between them. Or, in one pivotal scene, with Flic sitting and Minna standing, only her knees in view. Meanwhile Miriam Battye’s script is every bit as sharp and funny as you would expect from someone who served as executive story editor on the final series of Succession.

The odd mis-step aside, Extra Geography is funny, quirky and charming at points, but ultimately rather slight.

Until August 17

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