Summary
At the Junior League, a woman addresses a room full of debutantes-to-be, including Olivia and Monique. In the middle of the meeting, Viola stumbles in wearing a jean jacket and clumsily bumping into things as she makes her way to her seat.
At lunch, Viola eats sloppily, when the coordinator leans over and reminds her: "Chew like you have a secret." When Olivia stands and leaves the luncheon room, Viola follows her into the bathroom, scowling. At the sinks, Olivia recognizes her as the girl who saved her at the kissing booth and they introduce themselves. Seeing an opportunity, Viola tells Olivia that Duke has a salivary gland condition and drools a lot while kissing. "But, hey, every happiness to you both," she says, affably.
With this, Olivia clarifies that she has a thing for Sebastian and was trying to make him jealous. Viola's eyes widen, and she encourages Olivia to be more straightforward with Sebastian. Suddenly, Monique emerges from a stall and calls Olivia a "homewrecker." "Oh this is not good," Viola mutters to herself. After Monique continues to insult Olivia, the two girls get in a wild physical fight, and Viola jumps on Monique's back. They scream and fight until the coordinator of the debutante ball comes in and pleads with them, "When debutantes disagree, they say it with their eyes."
Malcolm confronts Headmaster Gold about "Sebastian," suggesting that he is hiding something. As Gold prunes a flowering bush, he assures Malcolm that Sebastian is an "all-American red-blooded male." Just as he says this, Viola, dressed as Sebastian, appears nearby, talking on the phone with her mom as Viola. She insists that she will not wear heels to the debutante ball, saying, "Heels are a male invention designed to make a woman's butt look smaller. And to make it harder for them to run away."
That night, the real Sebastian gets out of a cab at the school. Olivia runs towards him and without really looking him in the eyes, kisses him and tells him she is ready to "free-fall into the unknown." She says she'll see him at the soccer game the next day and runs away without looking at him. Meanwhile, Duke watches from nearby, disappointed.
Monique listens to her messages at home and hears Sebastian's message that he's been in England. She leaves her room enraged.
In her dorm room, Viola greets Duke, but he is angry with her, thinking it was her he saw Olivia kiss next to the cab. Viola thinks that Duke is talking about her disguise and starts to come clean, but Duke bursts into a rage and tells her that he saw her kissing Olivia at the cab. "Olivia never even liked you! She was just using you to make me jealous!" Viola yells, before telling Duke that Viola is in love with him. Duke pushes Viola out of the room, angry.
In his room, Malcolm looks at an old yearbook, in which he discovers that Sebastian is a twin. Meanwhile, Monique bangs on Duke and Sebastian's door. Duke opens it and tells her that Sebastian isn't there, before giving Monique Viola's cellphone. Monique is fuming and walks down the hall, realizing the phone is Viola's. She runs into Malcolm, who introduces himself.
Outside, Viola sits on a bench. Eunice comes up and sits next to her, and Viola apologizes for leaving the date the other night. When Eunice offers for Viola to sleep in her room, Viola accepts. The real Sebastian comes into his dorm room, where Duke is already asleep, and goes to bed.
The next day is the Cornwall game. Malcolm and Monique go to Headmaster Gold's office to reveal the plan while everyone gets ready for the game. Somehow, Sebastian still goes unnoticed by Duke, who leaves before him. Viola oversleeps, before running off to join her teammates.
At the soccer game, Viola's mother and father sit next to each other in the bleachers. Her father asks what's going on, and her mother tells him that they were called into the soccer game by the headmaster. As Viola sprints towards the field, her mother and father realize that Viola has not been staying with either of them for the past few weeks.
The soccer game starts, with the real Sebastian taking his place among the other players, unsure of what's going on. At the center line, Justin and Duke refuse to shake hands. The real Sebastian is not very good at soccer and keeps letting his team down. Meanwhile, Viola watches from under the bleachers and realizes that her brother is back from London.
Suddenly, Headmaster Gold calls for a pause in the game. He asks the real Sebastian if there's anything he wants to reveal, but the real Sebastian is at a loss. Gold then takes a megaphone and says, "Sebastian Hastings is a girl," and proclaims that he is Viola in disguise. Sebastian is indignant and pulls down his shorts to reveal that he has male genitals.
Gold is disappointed and the game continues. Dinklage sends Sebastian to the bench and Cornwall begins to win the game. During halftime, Viola pulls Sebastian under the bleachers and reveals that she posed as him to prove that she could play on the boys soccer team. "I just came here to find the amazing girl that kissed me last night," Sebastian says, and Viola realizes that that was the kiss that Duke saw. The twins switch clothes and Viola joins her team on the field. She plays very well.
Analysis
Things keep getting more complicated as Viola prepares for the debutante ball and Sebastian arrives home early. At a debutante luncheon, we see Viola arriving late to a roomful of women that includes Olivia and Monique. Viola and Olivia officially meet in the bathroom, and while Olivia has no idea that they have met before, Viola now views Olivia as a competitor for Duke's heart. A great deal of the comedy of the film comes out of scenarios in which only Viola is aware of what's really going on.
The film does not shy away from broad comic moments. For instance, when Monique confronts Olivia in the bathroom about flirting with Sebastian, an outlandish physical fight ensues. The debutantes, wearing pastel dresses, begin fighting with a passion, screaming and slapping one another, breaking glass and throwing one another against the wall. The film get a lot of comic mileage out of showing the ways that strict rules of gender often cover up more unruly impulses and behavior beneath the surface. These young women, when they unleash the full force of their desires and identities, become anything but demure debutantes.
For all her ingenuity, Viola proves not to have really thought through her cross-dressing plan entirely, and as the big game gets closer and the real Sebastian arrives at Illyria a day early, matters get messy. Duke thinks Olivia kissed Viola, who he thinks is Sebastian. Viola loves Duke, but cannot reveal that she is dressed as a boy. Sebastian has no idea that Viola has been posing as him and so arrives at school blissfully ignorant. Meanwhile, Malcolm is busy trying to prove that "Sebastian" is hiding something.
Malcolm and Monique try to accuse the real Sebastian of being Viola in disguise during the big game, with Gold even going so far as to simply call him "a girl," a proclamation which is met with jeers and laughs. Making matters even more complicated and ridiculous, Sebastian drops tro' to reveal his male genitalia as proof of his male-ness. The community is satisfied with this, even if they are confused by the accusation. To a contemporary viewer, this sequence might read as a comment on transphobia and gender presentation in high school, but it is played for laughs here, a comic sequence of high school humiliation.
The logic of the film runs on a kind of selective dramatic irony, in which gender is taken at face value. There are numerous moments in which it seems impossible for anyone to mistake Viola for Sebastian or vice versa, but somehow they do. In the moment that she kisses the real Sebastian, Olivia does not notice that he is not Viola, the person she has been crushing on for weeks. At the soccer game, Viola's teammates do not notice that the real Sebastian is not the teammate they have been playing with for weeks. All it takes is a wig and a slight affectation for Viola to convince everyone, and the film seems to suggest that people are much more suggestible to performance and sleight of hand than we might expect.
