Girls Will Be Girls Review | A Delicate and Effective Coming-Of-Age Adolescent Drama

Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls is a very delicate coming-of-age story about a girl who goes through a harsh adolescent transition. While the larger focus is on this girl, Mira, the film does manage to give us enough details about her mother, Anila, to make the strained dynamic between the two a compelling one. With Jih-E Peng’s stunning cinematography adding so many layers to the inner turmoil of the central character, Girls Will Be Girls arrives at the idea of empathy in a beautiful manner.

The story is set against the backdrop of a boarding school in the Himachal zone. Mira, our leading lady, is the newly elected Head Prefect of her school. Mira is an extremely studious girl, and the school has high expectations of her. Mira’s equation with her mother, who was an ex-student of the same school, wasn’t that smooth. What we see in the movie is the events that happen in the equation between the mother and daughter during the course of this Head Prefect tenure, where Mira happens to fall in love with a fellow student.

In the beginning patches of the movie, the narrative style made me think that this will be yet another tale about how females are caged in a patriarchal prison, which is endorsed by fellow women. You have a scene where the teacher asks the students to wear skirts below the knee in order to prevent “unnecessary” attention from boys. And in those areas, Mira comes across as this teacher-pleaser who prefers not to raise her voice. Shuchi Talati stages her awakening using her romantic relationship with Sri. The romance of the two is constructed as this constant possessive battle between a mother and daughter.

The mother character, Anila, is not portrayed as a flawless person. She is actually in a grey space where her protectiveness and desire for attention are making her a manipulative character. In the earlier moments of the movie, we do get to know that Anila also has witnessed her share of adventures in her school days. But as the story progresses, we gradually get a sense of parallels in the life of the two. Even though Anila is shown as this judgemental character from Mira’s POV, when you look at the total picture, Anila is the only one who stood up for Mira when it mattered the most. The “key” statement that happens in the final act of the film is that element that really elevated the film and shaped it.

Preeti Panigrahi played the part of the main character of the film, Mira. It is a very interesting character. She is the head prefect and considered the role model, and yet there is that curiosity in her to explore her sexuality. Preeti performs those bits beautifully, and Mira is not a character who is extremely vocal. There are a lot of shots in the film that sustain her face and subtle expressions, and the debutant was extremely confident in those scenes. Kani Kusruti plays the role of the mother. Anila is of Kerala origin, and she performed the overcaring, control freak mother convincingly on screen. Sri, Mira’s love interest, was played by Kesav Binoy Kiron, and the guy did a pretty decent job as someone who finds the key to people with a permanent, pleasant smile.

Themes around puberty and the changes that happen in people have had less prominence in our movies, and whenever they are addressed, it is mostly done in a softened way. It was really great to see Shuchi Talati depicting the female perspective on the whole thing without really making it an explicit scene fiesta. Minimal dialogues and character expositions keep us invested in the development. As I already mentioned, the cinematography of Jih-E Peng is really enhancing the story through craft. You can see him using negative space and deep depth of field in certain static shots that clearly convey the dynamic in the room and the emotional state of the character.

Girls Will Be Girls is not a preachy tale. It is a very nuanced and up close gaze at a girl’s evolution. In a way, one can say that the film uses the adolescent theme to show the psychological transformation of a human being. Mira, who had a very black-and-white approach towards life, enters the reality that everything is grey, and how she does that is by having empathy towards someone she looked down upon till that point.