I do have sisters, all teenagers simultaneously, but I am a bluff, bearded and balding cove and even I find it funny. There's a standing joke at Eye For Film towers about my inability to escape 'teenage girls come of age' films at festivals. They've got door staff across the city never once asking for a student ID or a Portman Prove-It card or even a Snapfax. They have a character wear new platform heels for three hours without decking it on any of Edinburgh's byzantine thoroughfares or its sometimes century-spanning paving. They've found a shop to fill in for what I assume was Whiplash Trash, that's fair enough. That the Fast & Furious franchise and Eurovision Song Contest: The Story Of Fire Saga reverse its one way system is a greater liberty than the Avengers sneaking in an imaginary kebab shop, but Our Ladies is set before it became one-way. Cockburn Street seems fated to never have its traffic patterns correctly reflected. That one of the various sex-pesty types the girls accumulate in Auld Reekie is sufficiently staunch as to wear a particular football top to a Northern Soul Karaoke all-dayer and keep a signed one on his wall seems halfway entertaining. Kate Dickie, as ever, is a treat, but dialogue about "sinners" feels more like your potboiler portent than anything any teacher or analogue would say. Director Michael Caton-Jones also has a co-credit as writer, and there's something about that many male inputs to a story centred on a Catholic schoolgirl choir coming of age that grates. Here adaptation is credited to Alan Sharp who amongst others worked on Rob Roy, though the stage version was by Lee Hall who did Billy Elliot. Though it was Lynne Ramsay who adapted that, and I suspect it shows. The novel was written by a man, Alan Warner, who also penned Morvern Callar. They've all got charm, cheer, are able to steer courses in a film that veers from the ribald to the maudlin and back. Some have had central roles Lawrie played Sophie Lancaster in Murdered For Being Different. This is a first big film role for many, for sure some have been in massive Hollywood productions with parts like "spaceport mother" or 'Margaret'. What doesn't serve them well, despite their enthusiasms and talents, is everything else. Tallulah Grieve's Orla has a pixie cut and an air of mischief, Marli Siu's Kylah is as much of Motown as Machiavelli, Abigail Lawrie's Finnoula and Sally Messham's Manda have compelling chemistry as childhood best friends outgrowing each other, Rona Morison's Chell is, let's say, mercurial, and Eve Austin's Kay is on the edges of the group, alike but not alike. The central performances are all very good. There are lots of things that are perhaps not too obvious, but Our Ladies tends to avoid those. It's perhaps not too obvious that it's just three hours from Fort William to Edinburgh by bus, so the odds of a school choir arriving several hours early for an event starting at six and letting them wander off in the middle seem low, even if the desire is to avoid the rush hour in the big city. It's perhaps not too obvious that it must be so because the sign says 'West Highland Council' too, though there never was such a beast, it would have been Lochaber District within Highland Regional Council, and in and among the legislative changes to local government (including, importantly, section 28), it would become Highland. It's perhaps not too obvious that this would have made it the northernmost Catholic State School in Europe, dethroning Lawside (1907/2008) in Dundee. One can grant dramatic license for this, it's important it be far from a big city and where they can see submarines. It puts it in Fort William, up near Glencoe. There's a church in Glasgow named for her, but this film (and the other works) posits a Catholic High School with attendant choir and so forth. Though the name of the institution is, one suspects, less about a connection to the Patron Saint of Haiti or any affiliation to the Redemptorists but for the opportunity to add a flavour of blasphemy to jokes about blowjobs. The Lady of Perpetual Succour is, of course, the Virgin Mary herself, an icon depicting not only the Madonna but Archangels Gabriel and Michael, instruments of crucifixion, and the infant Jesus who still looks perturbed by the goings on some five centuries and change after the first recording of the work.
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