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This film should appear on every year-end ‘Best of’ list, recommends Mayur Sanap.
In a landscape dominated by extravagant film franchises and flashy entertainers, experiencing a film like Girls Will Be Girls is pretty much miraculous. And reassuring.
That’s because it is a work of first-time Writer-Director Shuchi Talati, who takes a familiar story of teen angst and renders it into a truly authentic portrayal of adolescence that demonstrates her signature voice as a film-maker.
The title is a quirky spin on the saying ‘boys will be boys’, and gives us an intimate look into the mind of a 16-year-old high-school girl, played by the incandescent Preeti Panigrahi.
It is essentially a coming-of-age story that gently talks about social conditioning and how it looms large in a person’s formative years.
There are multiple threads within its carefully constructed narrative.
It is about a mother-daughter relationship.
The blossoming of teen love.
And a love letter to the fumbling and awkward years of middle school.
Without resorting to any banal sentimentality or weepy melodramatic situations, Talati shows such honesty and precision in her story-telling that it feels almost like an observational documentary than a scripted feature film, which makes it a rare cinema-watching experience.
Preeti Panigrahi is Mira, a star student at her boarding school set in the scenic hills of Dehradun. She is academically sound and seems to be wise beyond her age, which is why it is quickly established that she is chosen as the school’s first girl prefect.
Mira’s vivacious mother, Anila, played by Kani Kusruti, has momentarily shifted with her daughter ahead of her fast-approaching board exams.
‘I just can’t stand her,’ Mira says about her equation with her over-bearing mother. But Anila sees this as an opportunity to emotionally re-connect with Mira who has grown distant from her mother.
At school, Mira is drawn to Sri (Kesav Binoy Kiron), an international exchange student who is still adjusting to his new life in the hilly town. Sri and Mira grow fond of each other and soon embark on a secret romance.
Anila gets a whiff of their friendship but instead of rebuking her daughter, she allows goodie-two-shoes Sri to come over so that he can study with Mira, under her watchful eye.
The dynamic between these three characters takes a strange turn when Anila also starts enjoying the young boy’s company, which inadvertently creates a messy puzzle of love and affection.
There’s a constant undercurrent of unfamiliar in Girls Will Be Girls that makes it borderline unnerving. But Director Talati doesn’t exploit our attention for shock value.
For a film about female sexual awakening, it is all very delicate and precise, be it Mira gazing at her naked body in the mirror, or pleasuring herself, or practising kissing on her hand. These scenes are shown with a very matter-of-fact way with Jih-E Peng’s cinematography adding in touch of sensitivity.
Just like Varun Grover’s All India Rank, this film also lives in small moments that feel big, while gently peeling off the layers surrounding its teenage protagonist. And because it’s a female protagonist, there’s an added edge of social conditioning of patriarchy.
It is shown through Mira’s school principal (played by a suitably stern Devika Shahani), who monitors the length of skirts for female students and tells them to simply keep quiet when the boys behave inappropriately. The impact is quietly heart-breaking which tells us just how much awkward growing up can be.
As Mira, Preeti Panigrahi has a naturally sympathetic face that strikes the emotional chord. Her Mira is not a wayward kid like Christine from Lady Bird, but most of her anguish is constrained within her straight, stoic expression while being in complete control of her feelings.
Yet, there’s a scene in which Mira tries to hide her searing emotions when she defiantly tells Anila to ‘keep the door open’.
Nothing will prepare you for the sheer emotional intensity that this scene brings in.
In a stark contrast to her turn in All We Imagine As Light, Kani’s Anila possess a certain degree of flamboyance that’s very refreshing to see. She is seemingly unhappy in her marriage whose conversations with her workaholic husband are mostly focused on their daughter’s studies and well-being. We learn that she is an ex-student from Mira’s school, so when she visits her daughter, the same principal gives her a cold look that implies Anila also comes with her own defiant past.
As the film progresses, we see the come-of-age not just for the daughter but also for the mother, but in a satisfying change from the traditional ‘lessons learned’ conclusion.
It is this mother and daughter dynamic that will stick with me for a long time in a film that should appear on every year-end ‘Best of’ list.
Girls Will Be Girls streams on Amazon Prime Video.
Girls Will Be Girls Review Rediff Rating:
