A Return to childhood: British boarding school movies come back in fashion “I don’t want to look forward but to look back… to the cottage.” (’Never Let Me Go’)

Boarding school movies are a true British tradition which tends to resurface from time to time on our screens. It’s no real surprise then that a number of recent film releases from Blighty use these institutions as their main setting. Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek, 2010), selected in the ADFF this year, is part of this trend, bringing an original science-fiction background by adapting a novel of Japanese-British author Kazuo Ishiguro. At the Hailsham school, boys and girls are raised in order to become donors.

Over the past few years, boarding school movies seem to have made a significant come-back, from St Trinian’s (Oliver Parker and Barnaby Thomson, 2007) – the re-boot of the original St Trinian’s series which launched in 1954, Cracks (Jordan Scott, 2009), and now Never Let Me Go, these long-underestimated stories are making a reappearance.

A romantic air often surrounds the young love-aspiring girls, locked up in huge brick-walled mansions, wearing flower crowns and furtively reading Virginia Woolf. The pupils’ artistic skills are also a regular theme. In Cracks, the mysterious and diaphanous Miss G. is the art teacher, worshipped yet feared by all her students. In Never Let Me Go, the pupils are raised to enter into competition with one another using their artistic skills without knowing why, except that the best drawings will be chosen for an exhibition in an unknown gallery.

The surge of passion

Locked up as they are in their golden cages, the way time flies and the too-fast yet not unfinished transition from childhood to adulthood are both recurring elements of the boarding school film. The school period is often assimilated to a nostalgic era, even if it had constraints and borders. Because the unknown outside world is frightening and full of chaos, these films are regularly structured as flash-backs, retreating back to the safe school womb.

As there are many similarities in their structures, the boarding school film has become a genre of its own. However it’s a genre which nurtures itself from others: Cracks and Never Let Me Go can be defined as melodramas, while St Trinian’s turns all the tragic aspects of the girls’ lives into a frantic comedy. In the latter, Rupert Everett plays the weird old school headmistress, and in the final resolution, cheating is allowed if not encouraged! And of course Never Let Me Go brings science-fiction into the mix, as some great films already managed to do (for example Children of the Damned by Anton Leader in 1963).

Mark Romanek deals with many influences from British cinema, not only through genres, but also through screenwriting. Although it is adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, we can’t help but compare it with Atonement (Joe Wright, 2008), as the structure of both films is very similar. A girl steals away the loved-one of another and tries to repair the wrong she has done many years later, but too late.

Introducing both established and new talents

These films would never have expressed all their passionate feelings without the outstanding scores which accompany them. In a new century where symphonic pieces hardly find their way through the explosion of sound design and electronic music, the boarding school genre allows some of our greatest film composers to express their subtle views of youth and tumultuous love affairs. Musical geniuses of music such as Rachel Portman (Never Let Me Go) and Dario Marianelli (Atonement), as well as Patrick Doyle (Little Princess by Alfonso Cuaron in 1995 – another British boarding school movie) bring so much to the directing by entering inside the characters and complementing the acting to express their feelings.

As with the numerous British TV dramas adapted from romantic novels by authors such as Jane Austen, the boarding school genre appears to be a great platform for young new talents (many were those who followed the Colin Firth breakthrough in Pride and Prejudice). Amongst others, Keira Knightley, Juno Temple, Gemma Arterton, Saoirse Ronan and Sally Hawkins all either made their debuts or at least passed through boarding school-like productions, and are now today’s rising British stars in Hollywood.

By Elisabeth Renault-Geslin