A teen girl’s best friend is more important than her first kiss and while few would willingly admit to this simple truth, it governs the world of girlhood as we know it. Admiration, rivalry and erotic ambivalence colour the pages of Flic (Marni Duggan) and Minna’s (Galaxie Clear) yearbook at an all-all girls boarding school in Molly Manners’s Extra Geography. Solid friendship has already blurred the class lines between scholarship recipient Flic and Minna’s secure upbringing, and they are hellbent on making their Oxbridge dreams come true at any cost. Early on in the film, we get a sense of the girls’ ambition and knack for comedic timing, as snappy dialogue reveals deeply buried anxieties and an appetite for life. To boost their admission chances and to live a little, they come up with a summer project: to fall in love with their Geography teacher, Miss Delavigne (Alice Englert).
As one would expect from the director of a series that made us all swoon (yes, One Day!), Manners is fully in command of how the ebbs and flows of teen desire bring characters closer and pull them apart. She’s found a striking pair in newcomers Duggan and Clear, whose verbal sparring is a delightfully heightened version of the (girl) friendship experience at a time of intense curiosity and crippling self-doubt. Extra Geography, which is based on a short story by Rose Tremain, introduces us to its main characters on the cusp of their codependency – not only do they insist on doing everything together, but the competitive streak in both is making itself known.
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There’s a production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ involved, as well as boys from the nearby school to balance out the queerness of courting their bespectacled, lonely teacher. “Did you just, like, long?” asks Mina, as they try to name the emotions demanded of their summer project. One is tempted to place the girls’ sexual forays against a philosophical corpus (think René Girard’s theory of mimesis or Roland Barthes’ ‘Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse’), a comparison that would allow us an insight into the complex, contradictory psychology of desire.
Accepting the infantile nature of desire – how hungry and fickle it is – is a task for Minna and Flic, even though it’s bundled up with teen urges, such as insubordination and the need for validation. Wanting to be as good at love as maths or law propels them to chase the same goal, but what if attaining it means growing apart? These are the stinging bits of Extra Geography, but those emotional recalibrations deserve the same degree of attention as the comedic scenes – which is why the film is exceptionally well lit throughout, in a metaphorical gesture of illuminating the darker corners of the teenage soul.