The meaning of travel in Cracks (2009)

A little film analysis for this month’s issue! This essay is based solely on the film. I haven’t read the book Cracks (1999) by Sheila Kohler, which I understand is quite different. There are spoilers, but not every detail of the plot is revealed.

I love to travel. One day I shall have to resume my exploration of the world. It’s in our blood, isn’t it? You’re not like the other girls. They’re still waiting for their lives to begin. But not you.

These words are spoken by Miss G. (Eva Green), a charismatic teacher in director Jordan Scott’s film Cracks (2009), set at a British boarding school on the fictional Stanley Island in 1934. Her statement encapsulates a major theme of the film: the association of maturity and self-development with the idea of travel. Constructing her reputation out of tales of her unconventional adventures, Miss G has enchanted the select group of pupils in her diving team, particularly their captain Di Radfield (Juno Temple), who is given illicit books and the occasional drag from a cigarette. As alluring as a contemporary film star, with kohl rimmed eyes and floral kimonos, Miss G encourages her pupils’ infatuation with her, urging them to go beyond their limits and break boundaries.

Their insular world is destabilised by the arrival of Fiamma Corona (María Valverde), a Spanish aristocrat. In the romantic framing of the students, she is a princess who has been banished for an attempted elopement with a young Marxist. Compared to the other girls she is reserved and sophisticated, with a noticeably glamorous wardrobe and enviable diving skills. Fiamma definitively captures Miss G’s attention when she reveals that she too has travelled the world: with her father she has visited India, Africa, the Dodecanese and Paris. After this, already skirting the edge of acceptable behaviour, the teacher becomes obsessed with her student, and the film culminates in assault and tragedy.

Through the figure of Miss G., travel represents romance and the promise of life beyond the island. She offers her students respite from the strictures of the dour school regime, which teaches them flower-arranging, reads their letters, and allows only five personal items on their nightstand. The loneliness and petty cruelties of boarding school life are both experienced and perpetrated by almost every character. Removed from society, there is a strong suggestion that they are unwanted or forgotten by their families.

Travel has long been associated with coming of age, from the Grand Tour to the modern gap year. For women particularly, it represents a vital and hard-won autonomy, one that is still not completely enjoyed on an equal footing with men today. Miss G appropriates a literary tradition of British female exploration that expanded over the nineteenth century from aristocrats and imperialists’ wives to middle-class professionals. Figures of note include Isabella Bird (1831-1904), the first woman admitted to the Royal Geographical Society, and Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), an archaeologist and imperialist agent involved in the creation of the Kingdom of Iraq after WWI. This was a world of privilege, contingent on exploitative colonising practices that perceived ‘exotic lands’ as pre-modern playgrounds for white adventurers.

In this context, travel was a way for British women to reinvent themselves, push against constraints of femininity, and take on a more ‘masculine’ role outside the confines of domesticity. They could be active rather than passive, roaming abroad instead of waiting at home. Little of this awareness is present in the world of St Mathilda’s; Miss G is the only point of imaginative release for the diving team. The world she presents to them is an Orientalist dream, with visions of riding elephants in India or galloping across the Arabian desert.

Questions of authenticity create ambiguity around western travellers’ tales, from Herodotus to Marco Polo to Bruce Chatwin. Readers must try to distinguish between what is true and what is embellishment, misrepresentation, or perhaps outright lies. Miss G’s hold over her little world begins to loosen when Fiamma recognises one of her stories from a published book, written by the Victorian traveller Mary Kingsley in 1897. If the teacher’s dialogue had seemed a little too literary, too structured, and cliched for spontaneous speech, it is because she has learned it by rote from other women’s travel accounts. The treasured mementoes in her room are props in a performance. ‘Fairy tales, like all her stories’, Fiamma mutters over Miss G’s speech with audible contempt.

It is striking that Mary Kingsley was a traveller from the Victorian period, writing decades earlier. Her exploits are of a vanished world, not of the traumatised and insecure interwar period. This adds to the stagnant temporality of the island, hinting that Miss G is not such an independent-minded modernist as she has led her students to believe. From this point onwards, the film depicts Miss G’s spiralling self-delusion. Speaking about the character, Eva Green likened her to a figure made of sugar or glass, intensely fragile. The film’s visual language depicts this through her shifting physical appearance: as her clothing changes from colourful and patterned to dishevelled and monochrome, we see that her costumes are wearing thin.

The character of Fiamma is a crucial counterweight to Miss G. She is a storyteller too, but unlike her teacher she does not falsely insert herself into the narrative. At breakfast, she tells the younger girls an Arabian Nights-style story of a sultan, a princess, and a flying carpet, using an Amaretti biscuit to represent a magical blue diamond. In her introduction to the film, one of the girls in a lesson recites Shelley’s Ozymandias over visuals of Fiamma’s arrival, casting her as a ‘traveller from the antique land’ who will tell of the majestic sights she has seen. Although ultimately, in a note of foreboding, the poem warns: ‘nothing beside remains. Round the decay/ of that colossal wreck … the lone and level sands stretch far away’.

‘She has an intrepid spirit!’ Miss G says later as she berates the other girls for their diving faults, ‘Only Fiamma is willing to risk it all.’ Fiamma encapsulates everything that Miss G has wanted to be, the worldly personality that she has created. Except, of course, that she is an adolescent girl. In Miss G’s eyes, Fiamma’s travel experience is a sign of her greater proximity to adulthood, signifying their affinity. She envisages them as two glamorous travellers who will go on daring expeditions together. This serves to minimise Fiamma’s youth and the disparities of power between them. Gone long beyond the minor erotic charge of a mentor-apprentice relationship, now her fantasies justify abuse.

Through its examination of travel and storytelling, experience and fantasy, Cracks reveals the tensions between strict ideas of feminine restraint and a longing for active self-development. The girls are educated to be docile and domestic, their sexuality suppressed through athletics. They might dive, but they cannot swim away. Yet the repression of women’s desire for agency, symbolised here through the idea of travel, is under strain. The façade of static femininity is cracking. While presenting Orientalist fantasies of exploration as harmful, merely a delusion of resistance to the status quo, the ending of the film suggests that moving forward is still necessary. A stricken and humbled Di leaves the island via ferry, escaping the landlocked diving lake to encounter open water. Outward journeys chart internal progression, as physical expansion marks a commitment to self-discovery. To be human is to travel, to be in motion. The boat heads towards the horizon in the closing shot, as Di sets forth to prove her intrepid spirit, defined on her own terms.

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There’s plenty of academic scholarship written about women as travellers and/or Orientalists during the British Empire, such as the work of art historian Reina Lewis. Edward Said’s classic Orientalism (1978) or Culture and Imperialism (1994) is the obvious place to start if you want to learn more about this. There are several anthologies of women’s travel writing across the period, for example Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers, edited by Jane Robinson.

Lastly, I think the only streaming service where Cracks is available to watch is Amazon Prime (alas).