If you know, you know that first best friendship is a world unto itself – lush, rugged and expansive, nutritive and intoxicating, vulnerable to freak changes in the weather. Its specific terrain stays invisible to outsiders; only the two within it know, and they themselves are likely to lose it in time. So goes the perilous trekking in Extra Geography, Molly Manners’ nimble and frequently funny debut film, which astutely maps the peaks and valleys of one charged friendship between two adolescent girls at an English boarding school.
Minna and Flic, played by remarkable newcomers Galaxie Clear (coming for Chase Infiniti’s name game) and Marni Duggan, begin year 10 sometime in the early 2000s, in a sunny meadow of boundless, heady entanglement. They move in playful unison, share beds and mannerisms, hold common goals (Oxbridge) and disdain (for boys, and those who covet them). Manners, a Bafta nominee for her work on the better-than-it-should-be Netflix series One Day, is particularly attuned to the energizing rhythm of platonic-ish intimacy; the first third of this brisk, 94-minute film is a mesmerizing symphony of female mind-meld, the girls slamming lockers, opening notebooks, flopping on the floor and hatching plans to a swift, synchronous beat.
Their friendship is so textured, so worn and lived-in, that the engines of plot can feel incongruently arbitrary in comparison. Extra Geography, adapted by playwright and Succession writer Miriam Battye from Rose Tremain’s short story of the same name, follows in the welcome tradition of Booksmart and Honor Society – teen movies in which the female protagonists are prickly, unapologetically and even savagely ambitious, motivated by prestige far more than lust. (Battye’s writing shares with the otherwise unrelated HBO show a spiky, propulsive quality.) The girls believably endeavor to spend their summer break improving their chances of Oxbridge entry, by proving themselves “worldly”. Inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the worldly co-ed summer play for which they reluctantly audition, they somewhat less convincingly, if very adolescently, decide to fall in love with the first person they see. That would be Miss Delavigne (Alice Englert), their frumpy and aloof geography teacher.
Though Extra Geography takes its name from their clumsy quest to get an extracurricular invite to her cabin, the determination to force falling in love – “Maybe we should dream about her,” Minna earnestly suggests – feels, well, inorganic, an unwieldy aside to the far more nuanced, delicate and at times excruciatingly accurate portrait of a friendship frayed by envy in the more usual ways. Minna, the prettier, dominant element of the two, begins to upstage Flic – better in the play, better with the boys, better at charming those around her. Flic, at once repulsed and magnetized, leans harder into winning Miss Delavigne’s affection, unearthing fledgling attractions to women in the process. Both can be cruel, endearingly 10 steps behind their ferocious feelings. These two would graduate top of the class from the Elena Ferrante school of semi-erotic best frenemy-ship.
That it works – that the dissolution, in all its mundanities and ordinary indignities, is both painfully funny and a punch in the gut – is credit to Clear and Duggan, both extraordinary finds in their own ways: the former turns inviting and formidable, the latter brittle and smoldering, both dryly funny and utterly convincing as impetuous 15-year-olds. Clear, in particular, pulls off the difficult task of inviting both sympathy and spite, competing motivations shadowing her every move; though the latter half of the film assumes Flic’s perspective – she being the loser, and the Ferrante-esque recorder of her brilliant friend’s cruel superiority – she manages to make the scales feel even.
Credit, too, to Battye and Manners’s airtight grip on the fine line between friendship and rivalry, collaboration and competition, how the presence of boys warps the girls’ perception of themselves and everyone around them, even for those uninterested in their affection or approval. The road through year 10 may be rocky, but Manners is a confident guide – her film-making is splashy and stylish throughout, shrewdly conveying just how much one can learn, and break, in a year. There’s a refreshing bittersweetness to the girls’ bond, which may very well not survive the environmental pressures of young adulthood. They will recover, this winsome debut suggest, but they will never forget.
Extra Geography is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
