Our Ladies

Let’s call Our Ladies one of the new great British teen movies. Its jour­ney to the screen is even old­er than its riotous pro­tag­o­nists: direc­tor and co-writer Michael Caton-Jones first optioned the rights to Alan Warner’s 1998 nov­el ​‘The Sopra­nos’ over 20 years ago.

The film charts 24 hours in the lives of five work­ing class friends, all near­ing the end of their Catholic school days in Fort William, a small town in the west­ern Scot­tish High­lands. There’s Orla (Tal­lu­lah Greive), a leukemia recov­eree; Kylah (Mar­li Siu), the front­woman of an aspir­ing garage band of use­less boys; Chell (Rona Mori­son), an impov­er­ished girl haunt­ed by the drown­ing of her father; Fion­nu­la (Abi­gail Lawrie), the de fac­to group leader secret­ly com­ing to terms with her sex­u­al­i­ty; and Man­da (Sal­ly Messham), who’s feel­ing the cold shoul­der from once-close Fionnula.

There’s also Kay (Eve Austin), a derid­ed, wealth­i­er gang mem­ber des­tined for uni­ver­si­ty and prospects beyond reach for the main crew. They all head on a school trip to Edin­burgh to com­pete in a choir com­pe­ti­tion, but are more inter­est­ed in par­ty­ing, drink­ing and chas­ing ran­dom hook-ups than they are win­ning. The day’s mis­be­hav­iour and sur­prise roman­tic devel­op­ments spell dra­ma and fur­ther debauch­ery for their return home.

An unre­lat­ed, Olivi­er-win­ning stage adap­ta­tion of ​‘The Sopra­nos’ had notable suc­cess in recent years, and Our Ladies final­ly got the green light just pri­or to the hit sta­tus of tonal­ly sim­i­lar North­ern Irish sit­com Der­ry Girls, which also fol­lows unruly Catholic school­girls but is oth­er­wise very dif­fer­ent in plot­ting and characters.

Look­ing at the project from a more con­tex­tu­al van­tage, there are jus­ti­fied dis­cus­sions in con­tem­po­rary film cul­ture about who should be allowed to tell what sto­ries. With­out Caton-Jones’ long-held devo­tion to get­ting this made, the imme­di­ate optics of a male film­mak­er helm­ing a tale of young women eager to get shagged admit­ted­ly aren’t great.

Thank­ful­ly, this man is firm­ly on the side of these girls, and he avoids any kind of moral­is­ing or sham­ing over their abra­sive qual­i­ties, gut­ter- mind­ed pat­ter, casu­al cru­el­ty and, yes, extreme horni­ness. Direc­tion and cin­e­matog­ra­phy avoid the hyper-sex­u­al­i­sa­tion of bod­ies, while still allow­ing for char­ac­ters to be sex­u­al in the ways they find empow­er­ing. And with the dynam­ic ensem­ble, every sin­gle one giv­ing a star-mak­ing turn, light­ning-in-a-bot­tle chem­istry and pal­pa­ble authen­tic­i­ty are achieved with aplomb.

To avoid fac­tors like preva­lent mobile phones, the film is explic­it­ly set in 1996, in the decade the book was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished. This is also wise giv­en how Fionnula’s issues con­cern­ing com­ing out are root­ed in the par­tic­u­lar­i­ties of ​’90s Britain. That said, oth­er peri­od incon­sis­ten­cies prove Our Ladies’ lone bug­bear: two mas­sive hit songs from the next two years promi­nent­ly fea­ture, while sig­nage for a Har­ry Pot­ter merch shop is repeat­ed­ly visible.

These com­plaints are pedan­tic, though, as they don’t stall the film’s rac­ing momen­tum, which veers smooth­ly from exu­ber­ant opti­mism and gross-out humour to a melan­cholic reflec­tion on class inequal­i­ty and fate.