“And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.” Those words, from Arundhati Roy’s 1997 novel The God of Small Things, come to mind while watching Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls, a coming-of-age tale about a teenage girl who’s trying to navigate her newfound romantic feelings, burgeoning sexual desires, and longstanding familial tensions in a society where none of these things can be spoken about openly. Through its tender storytelling, complex characters, and intimate, tactile camerawork, Talati’s impressive debut feature manages to make all of these unspoken elements ring out loud and clear.
Sixteen-year-old Mira (Preeti Panigrahi) is the star student at a strict boarding school nestled in the Himalayan foothills. She’s the first female Head Prefect in the school’s history, thanks to both her sparkling academic record and her unfailing adherence to the institution’s many, many rules. She keeps her test scores high and her skirt hems low, as well as obliges her teachers when they ask her to lead the other students in the school pledge. As the Head Prefect, she’s even tasked with reprimanding other girls who fail to meet these exacting standards.
The opportunity to break bad from her goodie-two-shoes life arrives in the form of a tall, foreign student with a bashful smile. Srinivas, or “Sri” (Kesav Binoy Kiron), has recently transferred over from Hong Kong and finds all of the boarding school’s rules and regulations more than a little stifling. One day, he asks Mira to join his astronomy club and, after a little time spent stargazing together, the two of them giggle their way into a secret romance.
During this early scene, and in many of the romantic ones that follow in Girls Will Be Girls, Talati’s intuitive camera homes in on the young couple’s hands. They agree to a “no bullshit” rule on that first night, promising to always be honest with each other, but it’s their hands that communicate most truthfully—reaching out, pulling away, connecting and separating as they try to find expression for all the feelings that they don’t yet have words for.
Since Mira and Sri can’t be seen together at school, they spend most of their time together at Mira’s home, under the watchful eye of her mother, Anila (Kani Kusruti). Once a boarding school teen herself, and one who had to cope with repressive parents and an early marriage, Anila is more accepting of her daughter’s relationship than might be expected. For one, she won’t let Mira call Sri her boyfriend, but she will let him come over so that they can study together, enjoy a few home-made milkshakes, and even do a little dancing.
The dynamic that plays out between the three of them within this private space quickly takes a strange and fascinating turn. Anila’s treatment of Sri is often motherly but sometimes cusps on to something else, like she’s recapturing a part of her own lost youth by interjecting in her daughter’s romance. Across these study dates, mother and daughter shoot loaded glances at each other while they vie for Sri’s attention, neither of them able to admit what’s really going on. With each of these encounters, the air gets thicker and thicker from all the things they know—and that the other knows they know—but that neither of them can say.
Mira and Sri’s relationship continues to deepen as they learn about sex from a boxy computer in an internet café and then clamber off into the hills to put their newfound knowledge into practice. There’s an excitement, a blistering sense of alive-ness, to these scenes, but also a growing sense of danger. Panigrahi is a marvel throughout Girls Will Be Girls, especially in scenes in which she fully embodies that contradictory part of youth where you can feel both invincibly self-assured and terrifyingly vulnerable in the same moment.
While Mira may be the standout, every character here is painted as a similarly complex pattern of fears and desires—a person waging an inner war between what they really want and what they are supposed to. Even when the older women in Mira’s life are upholding the sexist standards that restrict her—like when her teachers refuse to punish male students for sexually harassing their classmates—we can see another part of them flickering behind those resigned responses. They don’t like the system any more than she does. They’ve just been living in it longer.
The remarkable thing about Girls Will Be Girls is how it’s able to speak so clearly to all the complex issues and emotions that course through its story while almost never addressing any of them explicitly. It’s a film that fully recognizes the power of a lingering gaze, a suppressed smile, the slightest movement of the littlest finger, and one which uses them all to maximum effect.
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