Our Ladies True Story: It’s typically the company one keeps, not the goal, that makes a voyage worthwhile. That is as true for the five vivacious Fort William schoolgirls who visit Edinburgh for the first time in Our Ladies as it is for the movie’s audience. It’ll be a pity when our time with these Highland hoydens comes to an end. Not every story arc concludes with a sex scene. It is simply an act of completion in one scenario.
After some unnecessary beautiful shots of braes and glens, choir members from a Catholic all-girls school descend on Edinburgh with high hopes of getting laid and zero interest in winning the singing competition the choir has been enrolled in by its optimistic organizer and conductor Sister Condron (Kate Dickie in an underwritten role), who is known to her charges as “Sister Condom.” Should the girls be unable to find suitable sexual partners in Edinburgh, sailors from a nuclear submarine that has recently landed in Loch Linnhe may be persuaded to cooperate when they return home on the school bus that night.
Despite the fact that one of the five heroines prefers women to men. The majority of the girls have agendas in which sex plays a role but does not resolve anything. Our Ladies was adapted by the Rob Roy team of director Michael Caton-Jones and the late Scottish Hollywood screenwriter Alan Sharp from Alan Warner’s third novel The Sopranos (also the source of the 2015 Olivier-winning play Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour); Caton-Jones got the film made in his native Scotland after a 20-year search for financial backing, resisting opportunities to shoot it in America instead.
Film’s Touristy Commodification of Scotland
The film is bookended by ill-fitting tableaux of the five working-class girls standing beside the loch in flowing white robes – shots as unnecessary as the picturesque images of braes and glens that illustrate their journey to Edinburgh (pictured above), where Princes Street and other civic landmarks inevitably appear. Sony Pictures International and Screen Scotland, the film’s American distributors, must have imposed the film’s touristy commodification of Scotland, which directors like Ken Loach, Lynne Ramsey, and Danny Boyle have refuted.
Our Ladies isn’t short on ironies, but they’ve all fated the holes left by unmet expectations in the film are far more amusing than their fulfillment would have been. The actresses quickly establish the identities of their personas. Orla (Tallulah Grieve) is a cheerful, level-headed recovering leukemia patient with a submissive kink she has yet to experience; the ringleader Manda (Sally Messham) is a tough, none-too-bright, and perpetually randy force of nature; her book smart best friend Finnoula (Abigail Lawrie) is bitter because her family is too poor to allow her to escape Fort William via further education;
Cool punk singer Despite the fact that Kylah and Chell have little to do in the present day of the film, flashbacks vividly flesh out their experiences, while still images track Manda and Finnoula’s friendship from childhood. Because she is the school’s university-bound head girl, a rich doctor’s daughter Kay (Eve Austin) takes the brunt of Finnoula’s mockery. Yet, via a series of revelations, the script deconstructs her goody-goody persona, and by the end of the film, she has taken equal importance to the other five girls, accidentally causing a split between the two of them.
Our Ladies True Story
While the film implies that the girls’ bond is fragile and finite, it revels in it nowhere more so than when they’re shown preparing for conquest in their Gladrags and makeup, a sequence that is Caton-Jones’ homage to his portrayal of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies doing just that in Scandal. It’s easy to imagine the females colliding with Renton and the rest of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting crew when The Sopranos was released in 1998.
Our Ladies, unlike Ramsay’s 2002 Morvern Callar, which was adapted from Warner’s 1995 debut, is set in a different era, and its raunchy ladette nostalgia is out of step with constrained current morality. Schoolgirl sex (as well as teen pregnancies, of which there are two in the film) is no longer a laughingstock – or something to be dismissed as casually as it was in, say, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). Our Ladies is a nice gift from the pre-woke past, but it’s up to the individual viewer to judge if it’s a delicate anachronism or a welcome gift from the pre-woke past. However, as Our Ladies demonstrates, the pack has an unexplainable power: it drives grown men to cross the street. It’s about time, then, that it was presented properly.
The montage of fourth-wall breaching outtakes that follows the closing credits is the best indication of the rowdy quintet’s allure. Outtakes are frequently a crime against cinema since they shatter a film’s spell too early; it’s preferable to let the viewer contemplate it until it fades away like a dream. Closing titles of Our Ladies clarify what happened to the girls after the story (and may prohibit a sequel based on Warner’s 2010 follow-up novel The Stars in the Bright Sky), which softens the blow given to one of the girls. As a result, the outtakes are an emotional sham, but they’re also strangely exhilarating celebrations of the actresses’ and their characters’ infectious liveliness.
Production
Development: Alan Warner’s novel The Sopranos was optioned by Michael Caton-Jones in 1998. In 2018, it was revealed that filming for a film adaptation had begun. Caton-Jones directed the picture and collaborated with Alan Sharp on the screenplay. Sigma Films, Sony Pictures International Productions, and Four Point Play Pictures collaborated on the project with Screen Scotland. Caton-Jones produced alongside Laura Viederman of Four Point Play and Brian Coffey of Sigma, with Warner and Jennifer Armitage of Creative Scotland serving as executive producers. For SPIP, Luke Scrase was in charge of the production.
Filming: The majority of the filming took place in Fort William and Edinburgh. Glasgow was also used for several shots. Our Ladies is not without defects. The tone is uneven, excessively eager at times, and unrealistic to the point of ridicule at others. Nonetheless, it is deserving of attention.
Release: On the 4th of October, the global premiere of Our Ladies took place at the 2019 BFI London Film Festival. On February 28, 2020, it was also screened at the Glasgow Film Festival. In January 2020, a trailer was released. (oldmcmickys.com) Due to the COVID-19 epidemic, the film was first scheduled for a 6 March 2020 theatre release in the UK, but was then postponed to 24 April and then 11 September, before being canceled permanently. On 18 June 2021, it was released in select AMC Theaters in the United States, and in cinemas in the United Kingdom on 27 August.
Reception
The picture was well-received by critics. It has a 93 percent approval rating on review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 29 reviews with an average rating of 7/10. “Despite its antiquated beliefs about teen sexuality, Our Ladies provides a well-acted and affectingly nuanced depiction of female friendship,” according to the consensus. In reality, the loner girl is a well-known archetype in coming-of-age stories, with this character’s likability generally based on her distance from the trifling issues that engage “other girls,” rejecting the petty politics of the all-female clique.
