Girls Will Be Girls Is The Year's Finest Film

IN THE SUMMER OF 2008, I cut a few pages from a magazine and stuck it in my diary. It was a short story from Jhumpa Lahiri’s anthology, Unaccustomed Earth, printed as a preview before the book was out to the world. I was 16 then and I remember everything — the font adjusted to fit within the margins of the page, the cover of the book stamped on the side, and the name: Hell-Heaven. I also remember carrying a nagging feeling in my heart for months like it was rupturing before it would break. It didn’t break but something altered as I kept poring over the pages. The words made me realize for the first time that the person living with me had an inner life beyond my reach of vision. I didn’t know because my mouth was trained to call her something as plain as ‘Ma’.

In Lahiri’s Hell-Heaven, a stranger gets welcomed by a young girl and her mother. All of them are Bengalis and in the US, migrants. As the man keeps frequenting their house, the woman grows fond of him even as her daughter remains oblivious. The story ends with a moment of confession where the mother admits to having wanted to do something heedless many years ago. Her intent humanises her but in my eyes, the possibility of her liking someone in the presence of her, albeit emotionally aloof husband was the gut-punch revelation. Post that, my gaze followed Ma everywhere, reckoning suddenly with the deep sea of yearning churning inside her.

The feeling stuck to me like a wrong road to my feet. Only the veneer changed. Initial suspicion transformed into empathy and later, when my heart was broken, it converted into kinship. But it came back with renewed ferocity when I watched Girls Will Be Girls. The Shuchi Talati debut is a striking coming-of film with the most tender gaze in recent times. On one hand, it is about a teenager Mira Kishore (a sublime Preeti Panigrahi) waking up to the precarity of youth. She is a topper and the first female prefect in her school. Teachers adore her and her friends dote on her. Mira likes being liked, except when it comes to her mother, Anila (a terrific Kani Kusruti) who cannot stand. Reasons are not shared but there is not much to furnish. she is embarrassed by her gregarious, attention-seeking mother. If Anila was her batchmate, Mira would have told on her.

The stringent mother-daughter relationship changes when a new student Srinivas (Kesav Binoy Kiron) joins Mira’s school and her life. The young boy and girl are drawn close to each other and inadvertently Anila is drawn into this as they want to keep meeting at home. With Sri visiting Mira, Anila starts interacting with him and the dynamic gets more volatile with each passing day. Mira feels sidelined and Anila cooks and tends to the boy who lives away from his parents. Through these characters, Talati designs a tactile drama that runs through the pitfalls of relationships to culminate as a moving ode to sisterhood and kinship.

Girls Will Be Girls is one of the best films of the year. I understand it is a broad statement that is both subjective and effusive. But it truly is one of those outings which sees you better than you are equipped to see it. As the film progresses, the neat outline keeps changing. New details come to light. Anila is an ex-student of Mira’s school and was married when she was 19. Her husband (Jatin Gulati) is mostly absent and in the few instances when he is there, he derides his wife.

Mira admires him and has taken up after him. Her mother’s neediness annoys her which gets more pronounced with Sri’s arrival. As a diplomat’s son, he knows the right words (the film uses “key” as a literal metaphor) and this subtle manipulation is directed both at the mother and the daughter. In inscrutable ways Girls Will Be Girls is reminiscent of Rituparno Ghosh’s Titli (2002) where the daughter nurses a crush on her mother’s former lover.

But Talati imbues the premise with radical empathy, making no room for revelation except for one where the mother and the daughter go through their own rite of passage but it leans more towards Mira which allows her to see her mother as a person. Watching the film brought back memories of a 2008 afternoon when I had read a story and started looking at my mother with a changed perspective.

Ma and I were never part of a similar situation. In fact, Ma has been a mother ever since I gathered consciousness. But if Lahiri’s prose had alerted me to her lurking personhood then Talati’s gentle outlook fleshed that out in the open, making me more accepting towards that. It does not matter that I did not witness her heart getting broken but it made me mourn for all the times that it had. I saw Kusruti’s pained eyes but Ma’s face came to mind. Maybe, girls will always be girls.

Girls Will Be Girls is currently streaming on Prime Video India.