In adapting Sheila Kohler’s slim novel about escalating obsessions at a girls’ boarding school, the makers of Cracks have transported the basic story from South Africa in the late 1950s or early 60s (the period isn’t quite pinned down) to rural England in 1934. The tone and texture of the film are as lush and brooding as the brambly forest and overcast sky that envelop the campus where nearly all the action takes place. The style is more akin to that of a less searching D.H. Lawrence — especially the latter part of The Rainbow — than to Kohler’s book, which shimmered like a sun-baked veld. These changes, along with numerous others both large and small, both cunning and arbitrary, work just fine. However, the most significant alteration diminishes much of the story’s disturbing power (more on that later).
At the outset of the film, the flamboyant, liberated Miss G (Eva Green), the school’s swimming instructor, serves as a mesmerizing, not-entirely-benevolent guru to the girls on her team, who in turn lord it over their fellow students. Most obsessed with Miss G, and most domineering in her attitude toward the other girls, is swim captain Di (Juno Temple). This cloistered sanctum of favoritism and barely suppressed Sapphic urges is intruded upon by new student Fiamma (Maria Valverde), a Spanish aristocrat who causes friction through the sheer force of her aloof self-assurance. Her indifference to the other girls’ petty jealousies only provokes more ire. A world traveler and a more talented swimmer than Di, she becomes the new focus of Miss G’s affections, but she is indifferent to these as well, and she exposes the teacher as a pretentious, provincial fraud.
This can’t end well, and it doesn’t. Along the way, Cracks recalls many other tales of boarding-school life and adolescent female obsessions. The cast does a fine job of breathing life into the archetypal characters. Making excellent use of her wide aquamarine eyes and broad, flat mouth, Green portrays Miss G as her girls see her — first as goddess-like mentor, then pathetic spurned lover, and finally harbinger of death. Valverde plays Fiamma as an exotic beauty who uses her indifference as a shield but realizes too late that it’s insufficient protection against the emotions she has aroused. And Temple succeeds in making Di sympathetic despite her officiousness and cruelty. The rest of the cast is good, but the only girl who stands out from the crowd is Imogen Poots, whose strong resemblance to a young Kate Winslet underlines the film’s similarities to Heavenly Creatures.
Director Jordan Scott (whose father Ridley and uncle Tony executive-produced) demonstrates a firm grasp of visual narrative. Her feature debut is so lovely the incessant music score (an affliction of so many recent dramatic films) detracts from the imagery. Scott falters, however, with the thematic complexities of the story, and the ending is a compromise, placing the blame for the most heinous acts of the climax squarely with a single villainess. This softens the group’s complicity in the crime and veers dangerously into clichéd predatory-lesbian territory. It’s more complex and elusive than that, but not as much as it should be. Early in the film, Miss G tells her girls the most important thing in life is desire, and the tragic ending is an object lesson in the perils of living a life based solely on desire — you might dream and dream and never act, and if you do act, you might do something horrible. But as Miss G says in a scene from the book that doesn’t appear in the movie, “It is always more grubby than you think.” The film is aware of the grubbiness underlying its beautiful surface, but doesn’t quite know what to do with it.
