A brilliant and sensitive schoolgirl in love with a classmate is watched, monitored and scrutinised incessantly as she seeks to break free from familial and societal shackles in Girls Will Be Girls, writer-director Shuchi Talati’s self-assured, award-winning narrative feature debut now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
The exquisitely crafted and insightful coming-of-age drama, an Indo-French co-production that bagged two awards at the Sundance Film Festival this year, is buoyed by impeccable writing and a couple of consummate performances by debutante Preeti Panigrahi and the seasoned Kani Kusruti.
Centred on the girl’s relationship with her over-protective mother and her negotiations with her school’s disciplinary norms, the film subtly and skilfully spells out the repercussions of the restrictions that a conservative society subjects women to. Talati treats teen desires and maternal instincts with striking dexterity.
Skirting around simplistic questions of flaws and strengths, the script views actions and decisions and their consequences purely from the perspectives of the film’s three principal characters and then projects them on to a larger, sharply delineated canvas through a distorting, conformist social lens.
Girls Will Be Girls, produced by Pushing Buttons Films’ Richa Chadha, Dolce Vita Films’ Claire Chassagne, Crawling Angel Films’ Sanjay Gulati and the director herself, has been executive produced by Ali Fazal. It has been made by an all-women crew that includes cinematographer Jih-E Peng, production designer Avyakta Kapur and editor Amrita David.
The film’s female gaze rests firmly on how little bruising battles are fought at home and in the world of entrenched orthodoxies beyond. Control is sought over the choices that women make with regard to their lives, hearts and bodies.
How the protagonist, Mira Prakash (Preeti Panigrahi), seeks to find her way past the stranglehold of rules is what Girls Will Be Girls is primarily about. Talati sets the delicate drama of first love in the shifting vortex of a girl’s journey from sexual awakening to self-discovery, a process that starts on a palpably physical plane and then goes well beyond it.
At school, Mira has almost everything going for her. She is a class topper and the first-ever girl to become the Head Prefect of her co-educational boarding school in the Himalayan foothills. She may have broken the glass ceiling but she cannot escape the prying eyes of censorious elders and disgruntled, even deviant, classmates.
The school, on its part, has oppressively strict regulations in place. The onus is on Mira to enforce complete adherence. Not surprisingly, she isn’t popular with other pupils, but her teachers are exceedingly fond of her owing to her promise as a student.
Mira’s mother Anila (Kani Kusruti) imposes upon her daughter the very code of conduct that she would have had to contend with growing up and courting the man she married, the girl’s father. I do not want you to feel that you need to hide anything from me, she says to Mira. But she gives her adolescent daughter no dearth of reasons to do just that.
Anila tries as far as possible not to let Mira out of her sight, especially when a school examination is round the corner. A new student, Srinivas (debutant Kesav Binoy Kiron), a diplomat’s son who has just relocated from Hong Kong, and Mira begin a tremulous affair.
A coy peck on the cheek is a major line crossed for the girl and the beginning of furtive preparations for her first kiss. But the personal space that Mira craves for is barely available to her. Anila quickly moves in and begins to manipulate the situation. Her aim is to keep a close watch on the incipient friendship.
In circumstances that give her little room for manoeuvre, Mira navigates her sexual desires and stolen moments with Srinivas as best as she can, one tentative step at a time, and seeks to steer her affair away from the inevitable interference of a mother who expectedly believes that she has the best interests of her daughter at heart.
The school, too, prohibits dating. It does everything in its power to keep the girls away from the boys. A teacher berates one student for wearing a skirt that isn’t the correct length and holds up Mira, whose hemline goes down to the knees, as an example for everyone to emulate.
A significant part of the minimalist storyline, which is focused on the mother-daughter relationship and on the two characters’ evolving engagement with Srinivas, a lonely hostel inmate looking for friends and homecooked meals, follows Anila’s moves to lay down clear guidelines for the “nice boy” she invites home.
On her very first meeting with Srinivas, she makes it clear that “I won’t allow anything more than a friendship”. Neither Mira nor Srinivas is obviously in the mood to pay heed to that diktat although Anila never stops letting them know that she is aware what they are up to.
The raging hormones and the silent rebellion take their own course in this affectingly intimate, sharply observant and unfailingly perceptive portrait of a girl’s resolve not to be hemmed in against her will.
Human eyes and mechanical viewing devices (the telescope of the school’s astronomy club, the microscope in the biology lab, the phone cameras put to questionable use by recalcitrant school boys) play a key role in the film.
Mira is perpetually under watch from her mother, teachers and classmates. “Mira, I have eyes,” her hostel roommate Priya (Kajol Chugh) says to her, suggesting that her affair with Srinivas is public knowledge.
Later, when Srinivas stays over at their place one night and Mira plots another secret rendezvous, her mother says: “You think I don’t see what’s going on?” This is a town where girls are always under a scanner and where anonymity is impossible.
Anila incessantly hovers over Mira. My daughter is my priority, she asserts. In one sequence, Mira, having felt the first flush of love, sits before her dressing table mirror. Music plays from a radio. She sways to the gentle rhythm of the song. The camera reveals her mother as she enters the room, joins the dance and wrests control of Mira’s space. Anila stops dancing abruptly and turns off the music.
No words are spoken but a whole lot is conveyed. Girls Will Be Girls abounds in such moments from beginning to end. Take your eyes off the screen and you miss a world. That is the kind of film this, both spellbindingly granular and resonantly universal.