Girls Will Be Girls, writer/director Shuchi Talati’s first feature, is a well-observed dramatisation of the misogyny that affects the lives of girls and women.
Growing Up Female
by Alexa DalbyGirls Will Be Girls
4.0 out of 5.0 stars
CAUTION: Here be spoilers
In a strict– mixed – boarding school in the Himalayas, earnest 16-year-old Mira (Preeti Panigrahi) is the first girl to be elected head prefect, an important role in the school. She is a model student, a bit of a goodie-goodie and academic, proud of leading the daily school pledge, enforcing the dress code, but things change for her when she notices handsome, worldly new pupil Sri (Kesav Binoy Kiron), a diplomat’s son who was at an international school in Hong Kong, and he notices her.
Sri also charms Mira’s watchful young mother Anila (wonderful Kani Kusruti, All We Imagine as Light), when Mira invites him to her house nearby, saying and doing all the right things and especially eating her cooking. Anila, ostensibly trying to keep hormonal teenagers Mira and Sri apart, becomes unexpectedly and uncomfortably close to Sri, and mother and daughter become unspoken rivals for his attention. We wonder what Anila’s motive is and what Sri thinks and if he has a plan, as Mira watches them.
Anila’s house is shot in dark, warm, almost claustrophobic, colours – red, brown and apricot. The school and its corridors are contrastingly blue and white with ultra-modern stairwells. The surrounding mountain scenery is lushly beautiful.
When boys upskirt girls on the stairs, the traditionally-minded female principal blames the girls for wearing short skirts, not the boys who took the photos. That’s the sort of patriarchal attitude in society that prevails, despite Mira’s breakthrough election as a female (though perhaps that’s resented). Mira’s relationship with Sri loses her her authority with the boys in the school: she still relies on her modern mother (wearing trousers and riding a scooter) to come and rescue her from being harassed by a predatory group of them and having to hide ignominiously.
Girls Will Be Girls, the feature debut of writer/director Shuchi Talati, is a lovely, involving, coming-of-age, first love and mother/daughter relationship film with a hard centre, though it can seem slow. Anila, we infer, did not get the opportunity in that society to ‘come of age’ herself and is doing so belatedly. The title is a sadly comic play on the saying “Boys will be boys”, says the director. Girls Will Be Girls won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.
Girls Will Be Girls premiered at Sundance, where it won the Audience Award. Preeti Panigrahi won the Sundance Dramatic Special Jury award for her performance. It is released on 20 September 2024 in the UK.
