Love and Longing

When Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, it quickly received attention and plaudits as it received the Audience Award for Dramatic World Cinema. Its release on December 18 on Prime Video has now ensured that the movie will move beyond the festival circuit and into households. And more importantly, it will now be seen by a wider and more diverse audience. While the overarching theme is of a mother-daughter relationship, it is also a movie about growing up and loneliness, being a grown up and isolation. If Thank You for Coming (2023), starring Bhumi Pednekar delved into a woman’s sexuality with plenty of HAHAs and HEHEs, Girls Will Be Girls is the arthouse tragic version of the same. It heaves with an undercurrent of unspoken emotions, it uses silences and stills to reveal the rifts between family members, it tells of misunderstandings while revealing that we are all caught in our own impenetrable bubbles.

Set in an unnamed boarding school in the Himalayas, Richa Chadha and Ali Fazal’s production debut opens with the principal announcing that Mira (Preeti Panigrahi) is to be the school prefect. Panigrahi emerges as the model student, doted on by teachers, both for her ability to max her exams and follow the rules, whether it is the length of her skirt or the colour of her nails. But responsibility also brings divisions, and her fellow students soon see her as a teacher’s pet and not one of them. Mira’s mother, a very Malayalee Anila (Kani Kusruti) runs a well-oiled home for her daughter who is most often away at school and her husband who is missing for long stretches. She likes being complemented for her food, if she is not doing laundry, she is vacuuming, or dusting. And in her brief spare time, she burrows into bodice ripper novels. Into this mix of ace daughter and lonely mother arrives Mira’s classmate the tall, dark, handsome Sri (Kesav Binoy Kiron) who has just arrived from Hong Kong, and has lived across the world with his diplomat parents.

Girls Will Be Girls is clearly a movie made by insiders, as writer-director Talati and breakout star Panigrahi both attended regimented boarding schools. As someone who has studied at such schools, Girls Will Be Girls nails the slow erosion of freedom in the name of discipline. These schools try to bleed out every sign of individuality and free thought. But the way of the youth is that they will always strain against these demands of conformity. Co-ed boarding schools are also a battle ground between the cravings of youth and the diktats of authority. The movie shows how boys can become herds and how spurned love can become a matter of revenge.
Panigrahi is masterful in her depiction of a student who is hardworking and intelligent, but who also will follow where her desires take her. The bildungsroman is a trope in itself, but the passage from childhood to adulthood makes for riveting literature and cinema because it is such a universal yet unique experience. Watching Panigrahi is to be reminded of one’s own messy and slippery adolescence and all the learnings and unlearnings that happened along the way. It was never an easy process, and one can look back at it, and only be relieved that it is in the past.

The most interesting character in Girls Will Be Girls is the mother played to perfection by Kani Kusruti. There are moments, when as an audience, one will gasp at her forthrightness with her daughter’s boyfriend. But her ploys to spend time with him and to thwart her daughter’s attempts come from a place of loneliness rather than deceit. Panigrahi makes the rage she feels for her mother visceral. Kusruti knows more than her daughter tells her. And this knowledge gives her the initial advantage. Kiron uses his charm on both mother and daughter, for his own gain, and at their expense.

This is a movie that shows how sexuality is most often not the romps in the bedroom, but something much more powerful. Sexuality is also how one sees oneself, how one explores pleasure, and how one feels towards the world. Girls Will Be Girls reminds us that even if mothers and daughters don’t always understand each other, they will always have each other’s back.

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