Hidden Gem: Wild Child

The past few weeks I’ve been trawling through some of my chick-flicks, including a few firm Hilary Duff favourites (The Perfect Man, A Cinderella Story) and some of the DVDs that used to stick in my head long after watching, such as Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen and How To Win A Date With Tad Hamilton.

Girly marathons aren’t usually my thing, but it’s really helped me get in touch with the more feminine side of myself – a side some of my more intuitive friends like to pretend I don’t have!

But, while I trawled through my collection I noticed one particular film I bought on offer but hadn’t gotten around to watching yet.

Since I checked out Wild Child, I have firmly stuck it on my list of films I can play in the background. I knew I’d enjoy it, but I wasn’t expecting to like it quite as much as I did! With charming characters, a playful look at the difference between American and English cultures, and numerous witty one-liners, it’s fantasticly entertaining. Main character Poppy Moore’s attitude to being locked up in an English boardng school is bitter and turbulent, with a deep-seated anxiety to escape. But, with a background like hers, it’s not hard to see why she finds it so difficult to relate to her new peers.

The students of Abbey Mount are, as a whole, far more reserved, and compared to Poppy’s previous best friend, her new room mates turn out to be much more genuine. It’s hard to understand why someone as sharp and intuitive as Poppy is taken in by her false friendship with Ruby, when even her own younger sister sees through the mask:

Lets be honest… if our “false” friends pulled this kind of face at the prospect of a goodbye hug, it might be easier to work them out from our real friends… but in the real world, it takes patience and experience. In some cases, as in Poppy’s, the lesson has to be learned the hard way.

Still, it makes for fun viewing!

Kirsty Watkinson