Plenty's been written about Eva green nowadays. But she's been slumming' it of late, esp. if one goes by her performance in this little-seen/known gem, that also boasts a fine ensemble, including Juno Temple and Imogen Poots.Though this came out earlier, a case can be made that this would make a fine companion piece with 'Jagten', both of these being 2 sides of the same coin, as it were.The setting (a tad Gothic in nature, though the bright lighting in almost every scene tries to keep that presumption at bay) is a young girls' boarding school, and things are not always what they seem. Suffice to say that talking more about this might give most of the plot away, so I should stop here, and advise you not to read anything up. Very dark, not for the squeamish, this is a study in obsession and deception, and keeps one guessing right until the end, where a dash of irony makes us feel that everyone is the protagonist with nary an antagonist. In a lesser work, that might make it all unravel (negatively), but in this, it kinda suits the material on play.Not to be missed. A fine addition to Green's filmography.

Tense and suspenseful, Cracks is a well-paced, carefully crafted period piece. It is about the consequences of creating insular environments which breed mean-spirited hierarchies and draw ill-motivated authority figures. Situations in which the authority figures empower, reward and smile upon petty tyrants because they share the same deviant mindset and orientation.In this offbeat tale of hatred and hazing, the cloistered children of favored society engage in cruel conformity at an all-girls' school in rural 1934 England. The story focuses on an elite Brody set of girls who comprise the academy's token diving team. The girls are mentored by their vapid instructor and swim coach, Miss G. (Green). (An apparent tribute to Muriel Sparks's novel and film, The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie.) None of the students are really happy or normal. They are the issue of the minor gentry. Their absentee parents unceremoniously dump them off at St. Mathilda, and never return. Disposing of their kids frees the adults to pursue their lavish lifestyles. And the girls know it. The polite rejection, combined with a stifling parochial environment turns the kids into seething stew-pots of repressed self-doubt and resentment.A titled Spanish heiress arrives. She is a precocious and cultured patrician. Of course the other girls retaliate. Fiamma (Valverde) becomes a magnet for their jealousy, licentiousness and rage. While most of the girls lament that their parents seem to have forgotten about them and will never bring them home again, privileged Fiamma is vocally confident that her stretch will be short. Fiamma enjoys lavish gifts and delicacies from home. She shares them with her classmates while regaling them with wondrous tales of travel experiences and folklore. This only make things worse.Di Rutfield (Temple), the swim team captain, is at once overshadowed and out-performed. Fiamma outflanks her socially, culturally, intellectually, and most devastatingly of all, athletically. Di no longer sets the bar by which the other girls are measured. To the contrary, she must now measure up to it.More perilously, Di has lost her favored status as the apple of Miss G's eye. Coveted, courted and pampered by the girls' diving coach, Di was bonded to her by a barely suppressed. mutual undercurrent of romantic and sexual high voltage. Upon Fiamma's debut, Miss G's attentions shift to the enigmatic new enchantress.My own snobby boarding school wasn't Catholic, and it was well enough administered that there was a minimum of clique exclusiveness, hazing and cruelty. But oh my, do I ever recognize the personality of Miss G. She is a tortured closet lesbian, perpetually titillated by her juvenile charges. A bundle of insecurities and self-perceived inadequacies, Miss G. fortifies her ego by reveling in the matriarchal power or her position. She is quietly desperate, dangling on a smoldering time-fuse, and primed for an angry episode of sexually frustrated, catastrophic hysteria at the first hint of a substantial challenge to her authority.Damningly, Miss G. is also a fraud who recites adventures from Mary Kingsley's Travels To West Africa (1897), claiming the experiences to be her own. Having been at St. Mathilda continuously since she was a schoolgirl, Miss G. convinces her students that she's a feisty, liberated explorer. Fiamma really has traveled however, and Miss G resents it. Gifted, independent, rebellious by the standard of the day, it's obvious Fiamma is more wordily and educated than Miss G.Miss G. loves Fiamma, and she hates her. She wants to alternately kiss and slap the girl. Miss G. is drowning in a swirling infusion of hormonal captivation and intimidated insecurity. She veils her own closeted sexuality and verboten urges for Fiamma behind a tenuous mask of low key hostility. Churning under her increasingly strained visage lurks a poisonous cocktail of spite, infatuation, and abject lust. Tensions amplify. Fiamma, Di, and Miss G. square off. Together they plunge into a sensational maelstrom of bitter jealously, taboo coitus, madness, and salacious mayhem.As in William Golding's novel Lord Of The Flies, there's an irony at play in Cracks. In Golding's work, which has inspired several films, schoolboys are sent away from England to protect them from war violence. Yet they promptly do battle with each other upon being shipwrecked. Becoming utter barbarians, they revert to the trees within hours of marooning.In Cracks the girls study Christian values, social and intellectual refinement, self control and etiquette. When Fiamma smashes their authoritarian hierarchy, the schoolgirls' cultural and humanist graces evaporate. Collectively, they atavistically plunge to the lowest common denominator of bilious rivalry, sexual jealousy and brutality.Cracks carries strong shadings of the Muriel Sparks novel and film, The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, but it takes a dark departure. Tense, suspenseful, Cracks' gorgeous cinematography and top tier production values accentuate its thoughtfully plotted storyline. The result is a salacious firecracker of a picture! Cracks is a must-see experience for fans of such films as Heavenly Creatures, Loving Annabelle, and Picnic At Hanging Rock.

Cracks is a routine girl's-boarding-school melodrama tricked out with glossy production values. Good cast, beautiful location setting, and a trite, trashy script that exploits the usual salacious imaginings about all-girl schools and the women teachers there. If you dumped Maedchen in Uniform (the 1950s Lilli Palmer version), Lord of the Flies, and Schoolgirl Capers into a blender and hit the "puree" button, this film is about what you'd get.It's too bad that such fine young actresses as Maria Valverde and Juno Temple submitted themselves to this degrading exercise. And isn't Eva Green simply the reincarnation of Joan Crawford? Those eyes, how familiar they seem....

The website, Afterellen.com, fronts 'Cracks' as a "lesbian" film. I'm not exactly sure what constitutes LGBT cinema. But I feel that this one is about bottled up sexual energy, not lesbian love. The girls in the school are institutionally kept ignorant of sex and the perils of the real world. What we witness is nature's victory over man as the sexual audacity of youth overtakes Miss G and Di, with Fiamma as their victim.Miss G is the villain, but not in the conventional sense. I presume she's never had a boyfriend nor a healthy sexual relationship of any kind. So she naively mistakes her infatuation with Fiamma as love, causing her repressed sexuality to leak through the cracks and end up on the wrong person. Fiamma unwillingly finds herself as a combatant against Di over Miss G's attention. At the end of the second act, Di gains the upper hand by removing Fiamma from the school altogether.However, this is a three-way antagonism since the two active role players are Miss G and Di. Miss G makes three failed attempts to earn Fiamma's devotion: by charming her, exercising power over her, and fraternizing with her. Meanwhile, Di is keen to impose the school's social strata against Fiamma, who remains ever so resilient due to her advanced maturity.The third act exercises Fiamma's only remaining option- to befriend Di. But the truce is cut short when Miss G performs her final act of desperation by raping Fiamma. This action was catalyzed by Miss G's last interaction with her; one where she lost some of the team's respect ("Since Fiamma knows what's best, let her take the reigns!").This narrative is a classic example of an established social order turned upside down with the arrival of a newcomer (think 'Mean Girls'), and the school will never be the same for them. Fiamma's death catapults Di to search for a better life outside of the establishment while Miss G finally faces reality.To a lesser extent, this is a parable of man-made structure that attempts to sculpt human behavior by building walls around children and repressing their natural curiosity. This indoctrination usually works, but has its casualties. The ending reveals that Miss G is one such casualty.