Cracks (Tuesday, March 15, 2011) (16)

Cracks is set in a small all-girls boarding school on some island off the coast of England. There the diving club seems to run the school, and no one is bigger than Di (Juno Temple) who is the prefect of the club. Her best friend is Poppy (the gorgeous Imogen Poots), and the two rule the group and the school with iron bathing costumes. Their muse is Miss G (Eva Green) a teacher who is a former student of the school and claims to have travelled the world to all sorts of exotic locations before she went to work there. She's a bohemian, a reader of great books and rather easy with rules and regulations.

One day Fiamma (Maria Valverde) arrives at the school and rumors start flying around about who she is and why she is there. She's Spanish and there's talk about how she's from the royal family. She might have been sent there to avoid an embarrassing situation with a man and a failed marriage engagement. She's put in the house with the diving club and immediately is a source of interest, jealousy and desire for the girls and their teacher.

This is basically just another boarding school movie, not incredibly dissimilar from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Another Country or Harry Potter (OK - clearly those all have very different plots, but the boarding school parts of them are very similar... and this film doesn't really have much of a plot to speak of). This movie is basically about girls being mean to one another, discovering their sexuality, being mean to one another in sexual ways and trying to take down the top girl, whoever that might be (the role of the prefect always being relevant in these stories). It's all a bit dull.

Eva Green seems to play Miss G with a wink in her eye and a tongue in her cheek - at least that's how it feels. I don't totally know why this is, though it might have something to do with how she sounds speaking English. I'm not convinced she's a great actress (though I'm happy that she seems to like to take her clothes off in movies -that's nice of her). Sometimes her serious scenes come off as a bit goofy here and far from totally earnest, which undermines the bigger story movements. I spent a lot of time in the film trying to figure out what was so funny that she was laughing at. I never did.

I think the role of Di is rather one-dimensional, only really about a "mean girl" who is trying to stay on top despite her miserable prospects. Still, I think Juno Temple does a nice job with it. She's totally a girl you want to smack for being such a bitch - and that's really the point, I think.

There's a nice visual style to the film, but a rather basic one. It's set in this beautiful area on a picturesque island, they dive in a rocky cove and walk through an old forest. It's all green/gray (isn't that all of Northern England/Scotland?), but not particularly interesting.

Somewhere along the way in this story it seems that the girls here are not sent here because it's necessarily a place for an elite education, but because it's an exotic reformatory school. They come to understand they might never get off the island, or, like Miss G, might stay there forever as a teacher. This is sorta how I felt in the theater most of the way through as it seemed unlikely that the film would end quickly or easily. At least I got to see Eva Green's bare breasts (again).

Stars: 1.5 of 4