Review of Cracks (2007) by Kas G — 27 Oct 2009

Saturated with images of female beauty: there hasn't been this much slow-motion lingering on diving bodies since Leni Riefenstahl popped to her local swimming baths of a wet Wednesday afternoon. "Come on girls, be sexy," Miss G instructs her charges during a synchro session, and you sense this is more or less the direction coming from behind the camera, too.

Where Scott gets this streak from, I've no idea. Even when her father Ridley (a producer here) has shown an interest in the erotic arts - as in the love scenes in "Blade Runner", or the romance in "A Good Year" - he's demonstrated no particular aptitude for them.

Scott fille, on the other hand, is so consumed with cultivating a languorous, suggestive, hothouse atmosphere - one in which the application of lipgloss to Senorita Valverde's mouth becomes a task akin to Michelangelo's painting the roof of the Sistine Chapel - that she all but forgets about the nuts and bolts of plot, and has to correct her drift come the final half-hour.

.. There are a few inconsistencies in Ben Court and Caroline Ip's script - "I don't much care for open water," Miss G. confesses to a passing sailor, which seems unlikely coming from one who leads her girls in extracurricular skinnydipping excursions - and it's perhaps a couple of rewrites off being a truly satisfying parable of isolationism: at the moment, it's set in 1934, features a character on the run from Franco's Spain, and remains otherwise mute politically.

But perhaps "Cracks" doesn't want to spoil its lipgloss, and having this much attention paid to them makes it a field day for its actresses. Green, all severe European cheekbones and consonants wrapped in the haughtiest haute couture, is rapidly becoming the most compelling import to English-language cinema since Dietrich; Temple works wonders with an arsenal of fierce, fiery glares; and the tall, leggy blonde Imogen Poots is every inch the model head girl.

The film they're in may be destined only to become a cult favourite - as did the screenwriters' previous (and no less commercially canny) "The Hole" - but if these girls ever got into a catfight with the "St.

Trinian's" lot, I think I know who'd come out on top. And I'm keeping those thoughts to myself, obviously.