Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
OUR LADIES
Cert 15 ★★★★ In cinemas now
“Champagne? You celebrating?” asks a sleazy nightclubber taking a seat next to two six-form girls.
“We will be. When you f*** off,” comes the perfectly timed reply.
The sharp-tongued schoolgirls in Michael Caton-Jones’s raucous rites-of-passage comedy may look like easy prey but they make TV’s Derry Girls sound like shrinking violets.
Set in 1996 (“before social media and mobile phones changed everything”), the Scottish director takes us back to the era of the hard-drinking, potty-mouthed ladette.
His Highland heroines are in Edinburgh to represent their all-girls Catholic school in a posh singing contest.
But those expecting another Pitch Perfect are in for a shock. The five choir-singers from Fort William are far more interested in the erotic potential of a night out in the big city.
Caton-Jones has been trying to get this film made for over 20 years (he bought the rights to Alan Warner’s 1998 novel The Sopranos before it was even published) and his sex-obsessed, underage hard-drinkers feel dangerously out of step with the MeToo era.
Some of the double-entendres feel a little queasy too. But these aren’t just young women behaving badly. The bracingly authentic script lets us see the girls’ vulnerability as well as their steely defiance.
Tallulah Greive and Marli Siu lead from the front as cancer-stricken lead Orla and ambitious singer Karla, but all the young cast members are on song.