Showing posts with label cracks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cracks. Show all posts

Friday, March 18, 2011

Cracks

Opening this weekend: Cracks, directed by Jordan Scott

Synopsis from AllMovie:


A teacher who prides herself on being different meets a student who matches her nonconformist nature in this period drama. It's 1934, and Miss G (Eva Green) is a teacher at a private school for girls near the eastern coastline of England. While most of the teachers at the school are severe and strait-laced women who reinforce its reputation as a repressive environment, Miss G is more youthful and glamorous than her colleagues, and enjoys dropping hints of a free-spirited past to her young charges. Miss G encourages her students to challenge conventional norms of the day, and organizes a diving team at the school, which she oversees with great interest. Miss G also sees a danger in the cliques that dominate the school, and she tries to undermine them, much to the annoyance of Di (Juno Temple), who holds a high place in the school's pecking order. But things change for both Miss G and her students when Fiamma (Maria Valverde) enrolls at the school. Fiamma is from Spain and has a strong independent streak; she doesn't look to her peers for approval and insists on doing things her own way, which makes her all the more exotic and appealing to the other students. Fiamma also earns the approval of Miss G, but before long rumors begin to spread that the teacher's interest in her new student is more than academic.

Monday, April 26, 2010

Cracks

Showing at the San Francisco International Film Festival: Cracks, directed by Jordan Scott

Synopsis from the SFIFF website:

The cracks aren’t hard to find within the imposing stone walls of St. Mathilda’s boarding school for girls. At first they appear in the familiar form of elitist cliques, petty jealousies and bitchy bids for popularity. Girls will be girls, after all, and even in 1930s England, mean girls prevail. At St. Mathilda’s, diving team captain Di Radfield (Juno Temple) presides over her small band of snobs and also holds special favor with their stylish and provocative coach and teacher, Miss G. Draped in flowing silk, cigarettes smoldering, Eva Green (Casino Royale) brings some of her sultry Bond-girl style to an otherwise repressed, gray world of drab uniforms, stern-faced matrons and Sunday hymns. Di and her teammates are entranced by Miss G’s glamour and tales of international adventure, faithfully following her every word (“The most important thing in life is desire,” she avers breathlessly) and every move (a naked nighttime dip into frigid English waters, anyone?). The arrival of a new girl, the beautiful daughter of Spanish royalty, gradually splits the fine cracks into dangerous fissures. Fiamma’s pubescent sensuality and exoticism are both a threat and a lure for the girls and an increasingly unsettled Miss G. Adapted from Sheila Kohler’s 1999 novel, Cracks gradually reveals the darker inclinations of a secluded, self-monitored society in which obsession, rivalry and sexual awakening collide. In her feature debut, director Jordan Scott draws superb performances from her all-female cast, making her mark as the next generation of the Scott (as in Ridley and Tony) filmmaking family. —Joanne Parsont