Film

St Trinian's (2007)

Director: Oliver Parker, Barnaby Thompson

Synopsis

St Trinian's is the school for young ladies and it is once again facing dire financial crisis with the bank threatening closure. Headmistress Camilla Fritton is also in the firing line from the Education Minister as she espouses an unorthodox doctrine of self-empowerment and free expression. In order to save the school, the St Trinian's girls decide to put their differences aside and hatch a plan to come up with cash. The leaders of the gang, Kelly (Gemma Arterton) and Annabelle (Talulah Riley) decide that a heist is the only way forward, and so decide to steal Vermeer’s ‘Girl with the Pearl Earring’ painting from the National Gallery.

Movie review

From Time Out London

This ultra-glossy, twenty-first-century update of the original series of films about the anarchic student body of the titular ‘ladies school’ comes bounding off the screen like a feature-length ad for Top Shop. Out go any radical notions of female social upheaval and in come clumsy drug jokes, broad stereotypes and reams-upon-reams of thudding pop music. The lead performances from the young cast are generally weak (apart from an excellent Jodie Whittaker) and the script is a tiresome mulch of self-conscious cultural references. Not even a camp-as-Christmas turn from Rupert Everett as effete headmistress Camilla Fritton is enough to salvage this mess, which drifts aimlessly towards a tawdry heist finale that will only make sense to those with the ability to bump their own brain-patterns to the level of sub-moronic torpor. The one-dimensional, any-excuse-for-a-musical-montage direction does, admittedly, inject some much-needed zip into the proceedings, but in terms of a cultural legacy, this is one to file next to ‘Spiceworld: The Movie’.

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