Shuchi Talati’s brilliant directorial debut ‘Girls Will Be Girls’ opens with a scene at a high school assembly where it is announced that the protagonist 16-year old Mira is chosen as the head prefect of her boarding school in the Himalayas. The audience follows her life at home and school as it gets increasingly entangled with her classmate, Srinivas. Her relationship with her mother Anila is left unsettled after he starts frequenting Mira’s house. The film navigates a myriad of desires in relation to the societal norms that remain imposed upon Indian women.
At its heart, Girls Will Be Girls is a story about the complicated closeness between Indian mothers and daughters. The quiet affection that is never verbalised but felt in mundane moments—Anila helping her daughter pleat her saree in preparation for Teacher’s day, Mira holding Anila a little tighter on the ride back home after a particularly hard day at school and Mira massaging oil into her mother’s hair on a sunny rooftop. There is a silent comfort in these rather ordinary moments with her mother where apologies or expressions of love are never verbalised, but understood nonetheless.
Shuchi Talati’s film is an exploration of teenage desire, curious and all-consuming. Mira finds herself uncharacteristically breaking rules, being distracted, experiencing volatile emotions and being dishonest to meet Srinivas in secret.
Girls Will Be Girls touches upon the casual sexual harassment that young girls are subjected to in high schools and how authority figures often remain complicit. The teachers make a show of humiliating the girls for the length of their socks while exemplifying Mira as the standard. At the same time, Mira herself is initially taken lightly when she goes to the teacher with concerns that a group of boys is taking inappropriate pictures. She asks Mira to advise the girls to be more careful and claims suspension is too serious of a punishment for such a thing, before conceding that she will let the Principal know of the issue.
The film plays beautifully with visuals and sounds. The dialogue is not often the priority and it leaves a lot to interpretation, a lot of issues are subtly hinted at and left ambiguous. It is a movie that does not undermine the perception and intelligence of its audience.
