CALL OF THE WILD
THE CHARACTERS OF ANIMALS need no introduction,because you’ve met them before. In bars and on buses and at house parties where fag ends and beer bottles lie scattered across carpets. You’ve met them spilling out of clubs and into taxis, then again the next morning in the queue for self-check-out tills, bumper packs of paracetamol in basket. You might even be one yourself. There’s only one place you don’t run into them often: on cinema screens. “These are raw, imperfect modern women,” says Emma Jane Unsworth, who wrote the riotous new coming-of-age drama, about two wine-demolishing Dubliners drifting through life in a blur of boys and booze. “You know those patriarchal arcs in movies where you’ve got this messy woman who decides to finally sort herself out, throw all the alcohol in her house away, stop having sex and start settling down? Urghhh!” she groans. “We wanted to mess that up. They present women as this thing that needs to be fixed, to be tamed. We wanted to do something different.”
So while the characters of need no introduction, let’s do so anyway. Laura and Tyler are two witty, wisecracking BFFs living in a flat covered in clothes and Polaroids detailing past escapades. It’s a type of friendship that’s scarcely seen on film. “Female friendships are very under-represented. Quite often they’re secondary to the love story,” says Holliday Grainger, who plays Laura. “It’s the way they’re represented as well. In , you see all the flaws in
