Molly Manners’ Mannered Feature Debut

Two boarding school students try to academically approach matters of the heart with messy results in Extra Geography, a prickly, bittersweet, only occasionally convincing coming-of-age film. Directed by BAFTA-winning television director Molly Manners, making her feature debut, with a script by playwright Miriam Battye, Extra Geography trades in offbeat tones quite recognizable to festival audiences since the 1990s. 

Newcomers Marni Duggan and Galaxie Clear (what names!) play Flic and Minna, two year 10-ers (sort of the equivalent of freshmen in the U.S.) at a posh school in the English countryside. They’re inseparable, bonded by their shared Type-A ambition. They’ve got plans for Oxbridge and are hungry to add various accomplishments and experiences to their life CVs, thus making them more ideal candidates for acceptance. They excel at lacrosse, are brilliant in chemistry and seem well on their way to becoming stars of the school. 

But all that engineering has not really allowed for another significant facet of teenage life, one far less controllable than studies and sport. An upcoming production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to be done in conjunction with a nearby boys’ school (real boys!!), inspires the girls to teach themselves a lesson about love. All the blithery stuff in the play seems frivolous and silly to these focused, serious young adults, but they figure they should at least know what all of that emotion feels like in order to be better-rounded people — worldly, as they call it. So they make a plan, as if one can make a plan for such things, to fall in love. 

Only, they don’t target any of the gangly lads set to be in the play. They focus instead on their 30-something geography teacher, Miss Delavigne (Alice Englert), an unassuming frump who is wholly ignorant of the girls’ weird game. No fuss is made about the fact that this will be a same-sex love affair, though Flic perhaps seems more invested in that aspect than does Minna, whose eyes have wandered over to the handsome boy playing Oberon in the play. 

The film traces that sad and perhaps inevitable divergence, a relatable trajectory for anyone who came to realize in their school days that they were a bit different from their peers, even from a best friend. Extra Geography isn’t exactly a coming-out story, but it is about the tumult caused when the varied jumble of sex and desire and self-consciousness enters the adolescent ecosystem. Flic’s jealousy over Minna’s swifter evolution in these matters is sharply rendered, all its squirming need and embarrassment and confusion. Why do boys have to ruin everything? 

Though it is addressing raw, sometimes pathetic matters of humanity, Extra Geography does so in arch, presentational style. Its visuals and dialogue occasionally bring to mind Wes Anderson, particularly his early film Rushmore, for obvious reasons. I appreciate that Manners and Battye are trying to add some extra flair to what is otherwise a fairly conventional growing-pains narrative, but too often Extra Geography seems located outside any map of the real world. It’s a bit like the British streaming series Sex Education in that way, a show that undermined its frank inquest by drowning itself in hyper-colored aesthetics. Extra Geography doesn’t take things quite that far, but Manners’ technique is awfully, er, mannered, her carefully composed shots sapping the film of its realness. 

But the true problem might lie in the dialogue. While Battye has written for the screen before, most notably on Succession, her writing here suggests a playwright struggling to work within the confines of the medium. On stage, the stilted cadence of her script might have been better absorbed and tempered by the volume of a theater. Too often in Extra Geography, Flic and Minna seem more like personality types made manifest than actual people, which is tricky for young first-time film actors to try to smooth out into naturalness. 

That said, the film does find a surer, more organic tone the longer it goes, building toward a glumly credible resolution that thoughtfully colors all that we’ve just watched. At its best, Extra Geography is a wistful look at the crucibles of young adulthood, at two people forming and re-forming into shapes that may no longer be compatible with one another. That’s a rather timeless story, and indeed Extra Geography does not make any attempts to situate itself in any particular period (there’s nary a smartphone to be found in the whole film). 

I wish, though, that the movie was animated by more of the messy idiosyncrasy of life, the errancy and strangeness that can’t be so precisely storyboarded or plotted out. I felt that spark most keenly not in the tale of Flic and Minna, but in their cruelly dismissed classmate, Phoebe, who pines for the girls’ friendship but is rudely rebuffed. As played by the perspicacious young performer Aoife Riddell, Phoebe is perhaps the realest part of the whole picture, a sweet and desperate and boy-crazy kid bouncing with eagerness and nerves. Whenever she exited the frame, I wanted Manners to follow after her. I have a hunch that unlike Flic and Minna’s familiar journey, Phoebe’s would be endlessly surprising.