Pi@LFF: Our Ladies

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Pi@LFF is a series of reviews made by the Pi Culture team attending the 2019 BFI London Film Festival. Here, Matilda Singer reviews the long-awaited adaptation of a riotous coming-of-age novel.

The year is 1996. Five Catholic school girls - pupils at Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour - leave their small town in the Scottish Highlands for a choir competition in Edinburgh. Except, much to the disappointment of Sister Condron, most of their day out is spent drinking, partying, looking for sex, and swearing (volubly). If you think Our Ladies sounds like a grittier version of Derry Girls - you’re right. 

As director Michael Caton-Jones revealed during a remarkably candid Q&A, the producers of Derry Girls tried to buy rights to the novel upon which this film is based “and then ripped it off instead.” Alan Warner’s 1998 novel, The Sopranos, was put on stage by the National Theatre of Scotland in 2017, but it’s taken more than 20 years for an adaptation to grace the big screen. Caton-Jones thinks it’s because “nobody wanted to make stories about women” back then. Thank god things have changed. 

Although still in school uniform, Orla, Chell, Amanda, Kylah, and Fionnula all present as older than their years, brazenly using their sexuality to get what they want. Yet for each of them we see an honest vulnerability under the surface of all that bravado: Orla is recovering from chemotherapy; Fionnula is navigating her sexuality; Chell lives in the shadow of domestic abuse; Kylah dreams of a successful music career; while Amanda is confronting life in a town of limited opportunities. The choices in Fort William two decades ago? Keeping the town populated (teenage pregnancy and beyond) or getting a job on the counter at Woolworths. Kay - the archetypal head girl, who sits firmly on the edge of this girl gang - sees a way out through university, but even she’s not immune to the societal constraints placed on working class young women. 

There’s a sense of urgency to Warner’s plot, perhaps because Orla has survived cancer and is aware of her own mortality. Or as she proclaims to a figurine Jesus during morning prayer: “unlike your mother, I don’t want to be a virgin all my life.” The girls are all teenage hormones and impulsive neurochemistry - and the audience is dragged along for this ride. Some detours admittedly didn’t come together for me (I’m thinking now of the voiceover epilogue – five figures in billowing white dresses on the shores of a Highland Loch, looking eerily like angels – which was at odds with the film’s tone). The rest of the time we’re in a vivacious 90s pop-video. 

I walked out of the cinema in rapture, and was startled to read criticism that Our Ladies is reductive and doesn’t do justice to the female experience, or that it can’t because it’s written and directed by men. Caton-Jones says that he gave newcomers Tallulah Greive (Orla), Rona Morison (Chell), Sally Messham (Amanda), Marli Siu (Kylah), and Abigail Lawrie (Fionnula) a certain agency in constructing their characters for this reason. He admits there are things he can’t understand, the right type of thigh-high leather boots to wear on a night out being one of them. 

It’s true that some of the 90s jokes don’t land quite so well in 2019. Our Ladies is dated - both by the lack of iPhones and by the attitudes. Underage girls and lecherous older men never makes for comfortable viewing but, to me at least, it didn’t feel like the female characters were being sexualised solely for a male gaze. Perhaps the discomfort is that we rarely celebrate badly behaved women on screen. They’re messy, yes, but they’re also real. 

And if none of this sells it to you? You should go and see Our Ladies simply because it’s really fucking funny.