Cracks

Directed by Jordan Scott
(Ireland-U.K.-Spain, 2009)

Jordan Scott’s debut feature Cracks about an English girls boarding school in 1934 flows seamlessly with impeccable cinematic qualities, but lacks depth and originality. The omnipresent music by Javier Navarrete washes over every scene with insipid melodrama and becomes a distraction. It and the screenplay, based on a novel by Sheila Kohler, cast a romantic pall over the film. From the opening scene of a dingy drifting on a country lake with a beautiful, erotic teacher (Eva Green) languidly mentoring her most talented young pupil (June Temple), everything is overdone from the setting to the costumes and make-up. An audience should not be troubled by thoughts such as: would girls in a prisonlike boarding school wear that much make-up? Would their uniforms and other outfits look that new and pressed?

The story is too predictable, perhaps because famous (and more important) stories have preceded it—A Separate Peace, Lord of the Flies, and The Dead Poets Society. We know from the arrival of the new girl—a noblewoman, Fiamma, from Spain (Maria Valverde)—that disaster is going to happen. Fiamma exceeds her schoolmates and teacher in both beauty and talent. Will Miss G kill her because she can’t possess her, or will the jealous girls commit the deed? Suspense, like the scenario, is tacked on professionally but without originality. The lack of character development contributes to contrivance. Miss G who rigorously trains her girls (a group of ten) to be fiercely independent and unafraid of life has a complex past that is never revealed but could have been, perhaps in flashbacks that slowly make her insanity comprehensible and also deepen her character. Without such development we watch a paperdoll world that is beautifully appointed with costumes and atmospheres.

The girls high-diving into frigid mountain water—Miss G’s training technique—forms the movie’s pivotal center, and luckily, because it’s interesting to watch. As the girls soar off their perch, sail gracefully through the air, and then pierce the water—often filmed in slow motion—the moment is mesmerizing. We can even forget the implausibility of such training in hilly England in 1934.

Miss G’s hammering away of ideology to her protégés serves as the film’s intellectual theme. She is always preaching to them: Girls, stand up and be yourselves, trust yourselves, go with your desires, make your dreams come true. Your relentless physical training will release the body from the mind: Don’t think, do!

As the audience of Cracks, we periodically wonder why Miss G is always on the sidelines coaching. She is young. Where or how did her life derail to bring her to the remote girls school where she isn’t doing, or even training her body. Her cigarette smoking is one of her principal characteristics. In one scene, the school’s headmistress hints at knowing the dark secrets of Miss G’s past. She points to an old class photo on the wall, suggesting that Miss G herself attended the school; but the clue is murky with inaudible lines.

The ending lacks credence. Would the headmistress lack moral conscience to the degree of covering up a murder to save her school’s reputation? Maybe, but her switch to a diabolical mentality was sudden and out of character. Then, the young rebel Di—looking prim and determined—sails off, purportedly to Spain, to tell the truth about what really happened to Fiamma. It’s a bit ridiculous.

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© 2010 Gail Spilsbury, all rights reserved

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