Extra Geography

“Two best friends at a boarding school are bored. All "Flic" (Marni Duggan) and "Minna" (Galaxie Clear) want to do is be worthy. They are not quite sure of what, but they do know that they will have to do something to get themselves noticed and appreciated if they are to take the world by storm. Might taking part in the school play help out? Better still, might taking a leaf from Shakespeare's theme work even better if they were to form an unlikely romantic attachment with someone else - à la "A Midsummer Night's Dream". "Miss Delavigne" (Alice Englert) is their rather staid-looking Kiwi geography teacher and it is her that the two decide to ensnare so imagine something along the lines of the classroom eyelids at the start of "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)". Meanwhile, back to the castings. "Minna" gets the role of "Titania" and that involves rehearsals with boys like the tousled "Oberon" (Gabriel Nagy)! "Flic", however, is less than impressed at being allocated the role of a tree/mound and soon that's just the start of the rumblings in their hitherto creepily symbiotic friendship as a bit of green eyed monsterousness raises it's ugly head, hormones step up a gear and "Bottom" (Zac Hurren) the donkey goes for an entirely unscheduled swim that totally upsets the already wobbling dynamic. There's an engaging chemistry at the start from these two girls supported by some pithy dialogue that does raise a laugh or two with it's really quite uncomfortable yet plausible synchronicity. Sadly, though, once that's all been established this film starts to run out of pace really quite quickly and what was initially innovative and quirky soon just settles into something altogether more procedural. By selecting the residential school as the location it also seems a little more content to compartmentalise the disappointingly two-dimensional characters a little too readily into people we might have seen two decades ago in something like "Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging". It's got quite a decent soundtrack for cinema sound but I am afraid I sort of lost interest as it progressed. Perhaps it ought to have been made as a more condensed short feature?”