Director Shuchi Talati’s directorial debut Girls Will Be Girls ,now streaming on Prime Video, is a bit of an event. Just when we thought women were done saying whatever they had to, here comes a yummy year-ender.
Tender, thoughtful, forthright—sometimes embarrassingly so—and forever moving at its own volition, Girls Will Be Girls is a rarity: a film about women that doesn’t waste time pointing fingers at men for the flaws in gender dynamics.
Straightaway, lets give the devis their due in this slender and sensitive mother-daughter fable. Though Kani Kusruti and newcomer Preeti Panigrahi don’t look like mother and daughter—they don’t have to, I concede that—their creative commonality creeps out of every frame. These two playing mom Anila and daughter Mira, know one another in and out. The dramatic tension that flows symbiotically is just an organic offshoot of a relationship that transcends the limits of the screen.
Set on an idyllic hill station, much of the screenplay unfolds in a posh high school where the girls giggle about boys and the boys giggle back obligingly. But the sexual tension is more palpable at Anila and Mira’s well-kept home, when a charming South Indian boy Srinivas (Kesav Binoy Kiron) starts dropping in regularly.
Initially the mother-daughter welcome the stranger with warmth and strawberry milkshake. Cinematographer Jih-E Peng circles the threesome in dizzying twirls and whirls. But then the music dies down. The dance ends when Sreenivas willy-nilly(or so we believe at this point) starts paying more attention to the mother.
The sharply drawn breaths, the telltale signs of favouritism (mom makes three cuppas and leaves one for the daughter in the kitchen) the murmuring tension between mother and daughter hover over the skyline of this svelte statement on sexual awakening.
This is a film that carves it niche emotions with tender but emphatic care. It is really very simple: Mira , on the cusp of a hormonal outbreak wants the cake and she won’t let her mother nibble , even maternally, on the icing.
Till the end I am not sure if Anila is in a ‘Mrs Robinson’ kind of triangle with her daughter. Or is she just being a protective mother by keeping an eye on Srinivas (who is definitely not as innocent as pretends to be). But surely having Srinivas sleep in her bed while she also naps, is going too far with the motherly protectiveness. And who is Anil protecting, her daughter, the boy in their midst, or herself?
Before Shuchi Talati’s lucid screenplay could probe further into the sexual tension between mother and daughter, the narration moves nervously to the school to search frantically for a climax and closure.
The ending, let me say without beating around the bush, is far from satisfying. That Anila and Mira have “seen through” the boy seems a facile convenient closure for a film that raises so many uncomfortable question on teen sexuality so comfortably. But I guess at the end of the day, a film will be a film no matter how adamant initially to be something more.
