Girls Will Be Girls review: A coming of age tale that bridges the gap between commercial and independent cinema

In this review, karan_mir, aka Karan Mirchandani, delves into how Shuchi Talati's Girls Will Be Girls is the perfect concoction of commercial and arthouse aesthetic of filmmaking!

We have started to associate hooting and hollering with a film largely with commercial films. The grandstanding hero, in all his machismo, generates a guttural reaction in the theatres like no other will. Hence the “arthouse” independent film is to be quietly studied and pondered on, or used often as a calling card for superiority. It is watched in silence, with murmurs of approval. Girls Will Be Girls breaks both those moulds, creating a delicious cocktail of subtlety that plays to the galleries. This is ironic because it’s a film about breaking away from the established norms.

Set in a boarding school at the Himalayan foothills, the film tracks the coming of age of a 16-year-old girl whose biggest hurdle is her own mother. Placing the shackles of a Catholic school and its regressive traditions, the film bathes you in the tension of conformity from the start. The cold bars of an academic cage press against your skin, letting you know that any deviation from this would escalate the stakes immediately. And everyone has been there: the morning assembly, the general din around a classroom, the random scoldings from teachers, the shy glances with someone you like and the general threat of punishment. 

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The kids here in this film are projects of their parent's aspirations; the pressure to succeed while never stepping out of line is palpable. All the while, gender discrimination rears its head under the guise of school rules, the arbitrary lengths of skirts, the forbidden fraternisation. This microcosm of society, the birthing of all this control we wield on women around the world - starts at school. But Girls Will Be Girls takes that trauma a step further as it generates tension through the mother-daughter dynamic, pitting their aspirations against each other. Two women who went through the same system, facing the same scrutiny, finally finding their wings of abandon, all hinged on a boy. One is entrenched in it, almost forced to enable it, and the other spends her time in a house longing for something more than the cards her life dealt. 

All of this is conveyed expertly by the two leads - navigating territory where a lot is said with little. Preeti Panigrahi weaves a performance that stitches together more with stubborn silences and clenched jaws. Her frustration is visceral, and her angst is in every strained sinew. Kani Kusruti has a fascinating task of balancing a strict parent who also has cracks of longing. She doesn’t let the balance seem skewed; her sadness never fully bleeds onto her face, but you can feel it. Her character could easily come across as unlikeable, but she lets you in just a little so you empathise with her pain.

Director Shuchi Talati, as is evident from the raucous crowd reaction to this film, isn’t interested in appealing to our film nerd gatekeeping behaviour. She doesn’t want this film to feel inaccessible or hard to understand. Her film generated a shared theatre experience like no other I’ve had this year. Subtlety is box office. May this shatter every arbitrary rule we use for independent cinema, and may the story be the larger-than-life hero once again. 

Girls Will Be Girls had its Indian premiere at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival this year! 

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