A contemporary but apparently timeless tale of star-crossed lesbians at a posh boarding school. It adopts the point of view, or anyway adopts the first-person narration, of a mousy newcomer called Mouse ("I felt like a gray mouse heading right for the mouth of a cat"), who learns about life, love, fun, etc., from her two amorous roommates. ("I was like some kind of Dr. Spock," she confides, making the common mistake about the proper mode of address for the half-breed Vulcan crew member of the Starship Enterprise.) It is inevitable that a film of lesbians in boarding school will stir memories of the classic in the field, Mädchen in Uniform, and nearly as inevitable that the film would fall several miles short of those memories. It seems somewhat less inevitable and hence more disappointing that the first English-language effort of the Quebecois director Léa Pool would fall so short of her engaging little coming-of-age film, Set Me Free. Does the English language -- either her ear for it or self-expression in it -- account for how forced and unspontaneous the characters' behavior seems? how theatrical and stilted the players' performances? Can it somehow account for the babe quotient in the lead actresses? (Not just the junior Gina Gershon -- Piper Perabo -- and her clandestine lover -- Jessica Paré -- who surely seem well-matched as soul mates if mirror-image big lips, supermodel cheekbones, and peanut-shaped heads are anything to go by, but also the ostensible Mouse -- Mischa Barton -- who looks a bit like the prom queen in secret-agent disguise.) Can it account even for the director's sudden inability to do what she did so well in her previous film: shoot people on the dance floor? With Jackie Burroughs, Graham Greene. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd
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