Girls Will  Be Girls, A Powerful Flawed  Feminal  Gem To End  The Year With

Girls Will  Be Girls, A Powerful Flawed  Feminal  Gem To End  The Year With

Rating: ****

 Director Shuchi Talati’s directorial  debut Girls Will  Be Girls,now streaming  on Amazon,  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 willynilly(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.