Our Ladies review – scattershot coming-of-ager never quite coalesces

Adapting Alan Warner’s novel The Sopranos, Michael Caton-Jones’s Our Ladies is one of the unfortunate examples of a film biting off more of a book than it can chew. Packed with enough ideas and plot to fill a full season or two of TV, the end result is a slapdash dramedy where the jokes get lost in the sheer busyness of the overall production and the big emotional beats arrive without enough ground work to really earn them.

We start in a rural Scottish Catholic girls’ school, with the school’s choir preparing for a trip to Edinburgh for a singing competition. In amongst this team are our five heroines, ostensibly led by leukaemia survivor and subsequent minor local celebrity Orla (Tallulah Greive). Largely uninterested in the competition and facing down the fear of what to do with themselves when school ends and the bleak realities of adult life in a remote mountain town, Orla and her unrepentantly horny and foul-mouthed friends set out to have the rowdiest time possible in Edinburgh.

Given the run of the city for around five hours, the girls split up into groups. Some go shopping, some sneak past bouncers into Edinburgh’s sleazy pubs, but the trip takes a more profound turn for the secretive Finnoula (Abigail Lawrie) and rich-kid Kay (Eve Austin), who tentatively head to a lesbian bar away from their classmates’ prying eyes.

There’s an awful lot going on at any one time in Our Ladies, and while this does allow Caton-Jones to keep things moving at a rapid pace, it also means no one plot strand gets enough attention to connect. Tension is sapped with every cut away, and while this is less of a problem during the entertainingly chaotic middle act, everything starts to crumble when the girls head back home for what should be a heartfelt finale.

Suddenly, we’re in to heavy territory, but the blowout fights and buried resentments just occupy the same shallow emotional space as all the silliness that precedes them. A Magnolia­-aping crosstown musical sequence is absurd instead of moving, as is the epilogue, all freeze-frames and walls of text telling us what happened next in the characters’ lives.

This scattershot approach extends to the performances. Some of them are great, really jumping into the high-stakes mindset of a teenager, but others feel more strained, with stabs at edginess that don’t really land. There’s a central conflict here between wanting to be a realistic recreation of lower middle class ‘90s school life and Caton-Jones also trying his hand at a more heightened sense of wish-fulfilment. We’ve seen this fantasy/reality approach work well this year in films like Zola, but here the two ideas never coalesce.

There are some beautiful shots of the majestic Scottish landscape, and the fun soundtrack and moving musical performances from the girls themselves hold your interest in the short term, but Our Ladies is a victim of its own ambition. In refusing to be bound by any one tone or genre convention, it finds itself on an awkward island between them, only occasionally able to break through and land a meaningful blow.

Our Ladies is now showing in UK cinemas.