There’s a lot going on within twelfth-grader Mira (Preeti Panigrahi). Chosen as the first female head prefect at her seemingly orthodox hill-station boarding school, she’s battling most of the pressures and anxieties of being a teenager, while simmering in the shadow of her vivacious mother Anila (Kani Kusruthi). Mira needs to keep her scores up, balance the shifted power dynamic with friends and bullies because of her duties as a head prefect, and rein in her excessively eager hormones for the mysterious new boy – Srinivas (Kesav Binoy Kiron) – in class.
On the cusp of discovering her own politics as an individual, while fiercely resisting ancient wisdom of the elders around her, Mira is a wonderful concoction of a stoic young woman with a mature worldview – so much so that one could mistake her for an adult. Her inexperience comes through in moments when her fixed worldview is challenged by life’s curveballs – she’s naive enough to think her value system clearly demarcates between right and wrong. She’s about to find out life is mostly a series of choosing between lesser evils.
A still from ‘Girls Will Be Girls’. Photo: Screengrab from video.
Shuchi Talati’s directorial debut is sharp and sensitive in the way it dignifies the Bollywood coming-of-age tale. In an industry, where filmmakers have often struggled with portraying adolescence in an authentic, messy way, Talati’s film not only does justice, but also ventures beyond by toying the viewer’s notions of what’s transpiring on screen. It takes an inward-looking storyteller to mine something fresh and specific in a genre like this. Talati, who has also written the film, is in no hurry to tell her story, choosing instead to dwell on the silences, and feasting on the momentary reaction shots to tell how the energy in a room has changed. It’s breathtakingly assured, and very rare for a first-time filmmaker to have such a grasp on the world in her film.
Produced by Richa Chadha and Ali Fazal, and having premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film festival, Girls will be Girls foregrounds this coming-of-age story in the span of an academic year. Torn between her duty to obey her teachers’ trust, while also asserting her beliefs and freedom, Mira has a rollercoaster of a year. In one of the film’s most uncomfortable scenes, an annual event like Teacher’s Day, where senior students dress up as faculty while the actual teacher’s get a break, turns into a Stanford prison-like experiment – what begins on a playful note slowly curdles into something nasty. The bullies whom Mira had reported for creepy behaviour (the boys had taken up-skirt pictures of their female classmates near the staircase), cat-call and chase her into a dormitory room. It leads to one of the most memorable lines of the film delivered by Anila.
A still from ‘Girls Will Be Girls’. Photo: Screengrab from video.
When Mira discovers her sexuality, Talati’s writing does a delicate dance of retaining the innocence of the encounter, without dialling down the desire of the moment. A feminist in the making, Mira judges Srinivas for being more experienced than her. Mira casts aspersions on her ‘friendly’ mother, who caresses Srinivas with attention, turning her daughter into an adversary. Kiron is excellent as Srinivas – with kind eyes, an attentive gaze, a courteous tone of voice and charming smile. Not just the mother and daughter, Srinivas seems to have a way with words that can lead him out of most sticky situations. He’s aware of this power, and he wields it when necessary.
The film’s two pillars are the performances of Kusruthi and Panigrahi. Anila flirts with the moral police within us, when she gets too comfortable with Srinivas’s home visits, feeding him, running her fingers through his hair while he naps on her bed. Kusruthi plays the character in a very matter-of-fact way, making us queasy audience members feel foolish towards the end of the film. Anila’s character is a masterful misdirection for most ‘progressive’ audience members, whose dormant moral police awakens each time someone doesn’t perform their prescribed societal role. Anila, seemingly unhappy and lonely in her marriage, unapologetically enjoys the young boy’s attention – driving Mira up the wall. It’s a fearless, complex, open-book performance by Kusruthi, who hides this grace and wisdom beneath her boisterous exterior.
A still from ‘Girls Will Be Girls’. Photo: Screengrab from video.
But it’s Preeti Panigrahi as Mira, who is the shining star here. Her character begins to mirror a dam by the end: a reservoir of righteous angst, youthful pride, seething betrayal – all the while maintaining a straight, stoic expression. In one of the greatest scenes in the film, Mira tells Anila to “keep the door open”. It reminded me of Rituparno Ghosh’s Titli (2002), where mother and daughter are vying for the affection of the same beau.
Girls will Be Girls is a stunning hand-crafted debut by writer/director Shuchi Talati. Imbued with Pierre Oberkampf’s sombre, introspective score, and Jih-E Peng’s attentive, lingering frames, the film does what most Hindi films/web series often fail to do; see teenagers in all their incompleteness. The journey might have been long and arduous, but Bollywood’s Young Adult has finally come of age.
*Girls will be Girls had its South Asia premiere at the 2024 MAMI Mumbai Film Festival
