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Film / St Trinian's (2007)

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"We are the best,
So screw the rest.
We do as we damn well please.
Until the end,
St. Trinian's,
Defenders of Anarchy!"
Girls Aloud, St. Trinian's (2007)

St Trinian's (St. Trinian's School for (Bad) Girls in DVD release) is 2007 comedy film, a reboot of the classic St. Trinian's series of films from the 1950s and 1960s.

Like the original series, the setting is a disreputable girls' school, where the only rule is that there are no rules. When the school is threatened with foreclosure by the bank and the ultra-conservative Minister of Education, the girls, faced with threats from all sides, decide to pull off the biggest heist ever concocted by a bunch of teenagers.

The film stars an ensemble of well-known English talent, with Talulah Riley, Lily Cole, Juno Temple, Paloma Faith, Kathryn Drysdale, Gemma Arterton, and Tamsin Egerton playing the students. The supporting cast also includes Russell Brand as Flash Harry, Rupert Everett as Miss Fritton, Colin Firth as the Minister of Educationnote , and Girls Aloud as the school band. The film is notable for Firth and Everett performing "Love Is in the Air" over the end credits.

Two years later followed a poorly-received (though not bad) sequel, St. Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold (featuring David Tennant as the villain).


The film includes the following tropes:

  • Accidental Athlete: Annabelle Fritton is recruited for the hockey team after she smashes a bust with a mobile phone she belted with a hockey stick.
  • Adults Are Useless: Invoked and averted; While the girls do say that "No use relying on the grown-ups. We need to sort this out ourselves," Miss Fritton participates fully in planning and performing the heist.
  • Beautiful All Along: Annabelle's rapid-fire montage of makeovers twists and subverts this trope before ending in a standard expression that puts her in Posh Totty territory.
  • Black Comedy Rape: Implied when Geoffrey Thwaites has a drink with his old lover, Miss Fritton, and passes out due to a combination of the alcohol and unspecified prescription medication. He then wakes up naked in her bed the next morning to her euphemistic implications.
  • Brief Accent Imitation: Flash Harry briefly disguises himself as a German art collector...with a hilariously awful accent.
  • Celebrity Paradox: When looking at The Girl With A Pearl Earring, one girl comments that Colin Firth (who plays Geoffrey) was justified in wanting to shag her.
  • Clique Tour: New girl Annabelle is shown the boarding school cliques in the dormitories. She is introduced to the chavs (loudmouthed, brash girls), the posh totties (fashionable social-climbers), the geeks, the emos, and the first-years.
  • Cloud Cuckoolander: The receptionist, Beverly. It's implied that this is partially because she's often very, very high.
  • Continuity Reboot: The 2007 film borrows plot elements of The Belles of St. Trinian's and isn't explicitly linked to the previous six films.
  • Corrupt the Cutie:
    • Annabel Fritton starts out as a Naïve Newcomer who ends up becoming a fully fledged St. Trinian's girl towards the end of the film.
    • Miss Dickinson remains fairly kind hearted and eager to teach, she just learns how to get them interested on a more St. Trinian's level.
  • Cross-Cast Role: Rupert Everett as the headmistress Miss Fritton.
  • Custom Uniform: Due to the rather relaxed rules at St. Trinian's, all the girls wear custom uniforms apart from Annabel at first. Averted for laughs in one scene, where instead of scolding a student for dangling a girl off of the stairs, a teacher demands that she tuck her shirt in.
  • Dance Party Ending: With Girls Aloud, no less.
  • Famous-Named Foreigner: There is a French teacher called Miss Maupassant
  • Feigning Intelligence: Done as part of a Gambit Roulette when the girls partake in a nation-wide quiz to find the smartest school in Britain. They use increasingly underhanded tactics to win each round (including sleeping with the other contestants and drugging one unfortunate team) and use the Internet to look up the answers, which are then relayed to the girls on stage. It does help that they know some of the answers.
  • Fille Fatale: The Posh Totties run a phone-sex operation.
  • Finger in the Mail: Invoked while they are pondering how to find the money to save the school. Flash dismisses it as "too medieval", though.
  • Gargle Blaster: The vodka some of the girls distill is labelled "100% proof". It's powerful enough that a tiny taste makes Geoffrey quite drunk for a few minutes, and a shot glass full of it is powerful enough to knock a Russian girl unconscious. Previous versions apparently made people go blind and may have killed a woman.
  • Gone Swimming, Clothes Stolen: The girls band together to effect this trope on new girl Annabelle Fritton as she showers, filming the resulting nekkid antics on hidden cameras and broadcasting it on YouTube.
  • Laser Hallway: This film gives about every heist movie trope in the space of thirty minutes, which means that the girls have to negotiate one of these en route to stealing the Girl with a Pearl Earring.
  • Lower-Class Lout: One of the cliques is known as The Chavs.
  • Mad Bomber: The explosive-mad twins.
  • Mythology Gag: Several taken from the older films;
    • The bust that Annabelle shatters is of Alistair Sim, the actor who portrayed Miss Fritton in the earlier films.
    • Similarly, the painting in Miss Fritton's office is also of Sim.
    • The animated heist plan mimics the artistic style of Ronald Searle, whose cartoons inspired the films.
    • The uniforms the Posh Totties wear to the School Challenge are based on the uniforms from the earlier films.
    • On the way to the School Challenge final, the camera lingers on the visible tops of Annabelle's stockings. The fact that the girls wore this style in the 50s movies was seen as shocking and scandalous.
    • A deleted scene has a ministry official suggest "Let Those Wildcats Beware" as a news headline for the Minister's plan to make St. Trinian's an example; this is a reference to Wildcats of St. Trinian's. Thwaite shoots it down as stupid, which may itself be a reference to how bad Wildcats was.
    • At least one of the pictures the camera pans over in the Art Room is based on one of the original Searle drawings (The original caption to which is "...And this is Rachel, our Head girl.")
  • Naïve Newcomer:
    • Annabelle when she first shows up at school and comes around to being a full fledged St. Trinian's girl by the time the first half of the movie is over.
    • Miss Dickinson is the new English teacher and she's completely overwhelmed on her first day. She appears to have gotten a decent grasp of what's going on by the time the film ends.
  • Never Found the Body: Miss Dickinson comments that they have lost "four English teachers in six months," prompting Ms Fritton to observe: "Very careless of us. I expect they'll turn up."
  • Open the Door and See All the People: Reporters and paparazzi are at the school and Colin Firth's character just happens to stands nude at the window of the headmistress' room.
  • Shout-Out:
    • Pride and Prejudice gets a lot:
      • Many of the cast have some connection to P&P: Colin Firth was Mr. Darcy and Anna Chancellor (Miss Bagstock) was Miss Bingley in the 1995 miniseries; Talulah Riley (Annabelle) was Mary Bennet in the 2005 film version; and Gemma Arterton (Kelly) was Elizabeth Bennet in the 2008 miniseries Lost in Austen.
      • Miss Fritton's dog is named for Mr. Darcy. This becomes distinctly "meta" in that the dog is kicked out the window while attempting to hump the Education Minister's leg - even Mr Darcy wants Colin Firth!
      • Colin Firth's slow-motion walk to the hockey field in wet white shirt with his jacket over his arm mimics a similar scene he did in Pride and Prejudice (1995).
      • The quizmaster's question "What book was originally titled First Impressions?" references the original title of Pride and Prejudice.
    • Similarly, there are a number of shoutouts surrounding "The Girl With A Pearl Earring", starting with Colin Firth's role in the 2003 film of the same name, the explicit reference to Colin Firth wanting to shag her, and Chelsea initially thinking that the idea is to "steal Scarlett Johansson''.
    • To The Italian Job (1969), when the twins use a little too much explosive during the heist rehearsal.
      You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!
    • In her mannerisms and mode of dress, Camilla Fritton parodies Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall.
    • When Thwaites and Camilla meet, she says "Another time!" and he answers "Another country!" His response is the title of a 1984 film in which Rupert Everett and Colin Firth first starred together.
    • When Annabelle is entering the school for the first time, she calls it "Hogwarts for Pikeys".
    • A deleted scene has the girls running a Fight Club, which of course no one talks about.
  • Team Power Walk: The girls do this after having successfully pulled off their heist.
  • Writers Cannot Do Math: Stephen Fry awards points to a team for concluding that the volume of a sphere is πr3. A fourteen-year-old could probably tell you that it's (4πr3)/3.

 
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Welcome to St. Trinian's

Kelly introduces Annabelle to the various cliques at St. Trinian's (and also Celia).

How well does it match the trope?

5 (3 votes)

Example of:

Main / CliqueTour

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