In the Flesh: Cracks

“I am eyeless in Gaza, betrayed to the Philistines,” sobs girls’ boarding school instructor Ms. Gribben (Eva Green), leaning against her student Di Radfield (Juno Temple). The treachery to which she alludes is her pupil Fiamma’s (Maria Valverde) stated decision to reveal that Gribben raped her while she was intoxicated. It’s this hysterical, compulsively deceitful personality around which Jordan Scott’s twisted tale of feminine jealousy and predatory favoritism revolves. Green is equal parts hypnotic and pathetic, an emotionally stunted adult feeding off the worship of her devoted and smitten girls’ diving team. She speaks in nonsensical but poetic strings of arbitrary criticism and praise, jerking chains and playing hot and cold with her emotionally vulnerable charges as she builds her personal mystique with stories she cribs from adventure novels, manufacturing a false self to combat her near-crippling anxiety.

It’s hard not to think, watching Gribben dissociate through a brief trip to town, of Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock’s Rebecca. At Manderley, Judith Anderson’s iconic character has the granite poise and malevolent, judging stare of a cathedral gargoyle. When we see her in town for the trial at the film’s close, Hitchcock strips her of her power with a few deft touches, shooting her from higher angles and dressing her in an outsize hat and coat to emphasize her smallness and indefinite, stunted personality. So too does Gribben’s cultivated persona begin to unravel as Fiamma, an aristocrat unaccustomed to performing politeness for her social inferiors, refuses to participate in her little cult. Ms. G begins to fixate on her sole rebellious student, following her around the boarding school, reading her mail, and otherwise behaving like an unhealthy schoolgirl with a crush.

That Gribben herself is a product of the school, a ward who never left but simply assimilated into its rigid hierarchy, snaps her entire way of being into focus. She, like her charges, is an unwanted woman, a girl thrown away by parents too busy and disinterested to bother raising the child they created. Her compulsive lying is an unchecked outgrowth of the same normal trait among certain neglected and unhappy teenagers, her insecurity a relic of her own childhood abandonment. The result is Nabokov’s Humbert without the composure, a self-deluding predator still ravenous for the approval and attention of other girls she longed for as a child herself, a recluse with fantasies of world travel, an arbitrary bully posing as an auteur. Our last glimpse of her comes after she “decides to resume her travels”, taking a leave of absence to spare the school having to grapple with her predatory behavior and its consequences. She sits alone in a bare hotel room, staring at nothing, wrenched away at last from the children she fed on to sustain her self-image and visibly terrified at the prospect of enduring her own company.