Cracks

This is my mini-review of Cracks.

There are few films that feature characters that one both despises and feels pity and even empathy for. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another one.

This film will bring you a place that you will feel both, in creeping steps and in a confusing-enough way that you think almost that you’ve lived the final scene from both sides in all its desperate hopelessness.

Eva Green as Miss G in Cracks pulls off a quiet yet intense performance as a boarding school teacher who is not quite who she seems to be, perhaps even to herself. She exudes mystery yet is not truly mysterious at all – and at the same time seems nurturing and solicitous of her students and charges but is something else altogether.

María Valverde is Green’s perfect foil as Fiamma, an aristocratic, introverted and quietly adept Spanish student fleeing the Spanish civil war who is already even at her young age everything that Miss G wishes she could be, or at least could have been.

The film itself is difficult to place in the canon of cinema, especially as viewed by my American eyes whose sole real experience of British boarding school fare is Harry Potter.

That said, rarely does a film feature no male speaking parts at all. Also nearly as rarely is it directed by a woman (Jordan Scott, niece of director Tony Scott). And even more rarely are the women and girls allowed to be flawed in very human, very real ways while the director allows them just to be who they are – each cinerescent in character rather than expressing by directorial diktat some Manichean division between the truly good and the definitively evil.

Oh, there is evil in the film for sure, but I am not certain it is a chosen malevolence or more like some train on which the brakes are broken and the engineer is dead that will collide with the approaching engine and all its cars no matter what anyone does.

In that case, the work is like a Greek tragedy except the inevitable doom is visited on others as the worst fate one character can imagine has already occurred to her and within her.

It’s not clear if we are supposed to be seeing the events of the film through her eyes, or rather witnessing it as a documentarian: these things happened.

I rather favor the latter interpretation as though the film and the characters are well-drawn and not just sketches, they are there neither to be loved nor hated – they exist as cenotaphs to their existence only, and any other conclusions are left for the viewer.