On the parent-child relationship in Girls will be Girls

(Wrote this piece about Shuchi Talati’s excellent new film for Economic Times)
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Often, our expectations for a film are raised so high beforehand that the actual viewing is a let-down. Three months ago I feared this would be my experience with Shuchi Talati’s Girls will be Girls. As the film won prize after prize at the Mumbai Film Festival closing ceremony, Talati, her young lead Preeti Panigrahi, and producers Richa Chadha and Ali Fazal trudged to the stage every few minutes – and the jokes flew fast. “Get them a conveyor belt!” someone next to me shouted. Manoj Bajpayee, who finally got up there for another movie (The Fable), quipped about it too, aiming a wisecrack at his Gangs of Wasseypur co-star Chadha.

Happily none of this build-up mattered when I did get around to watching Girls Will be Girls. To mangle a famous Groucho Marxism, “It looks like a good film, and has been acclaimed as a good film, but don’t let that fool you – it really IS a good film!”

I was rapt all the way through – by the fluidity of the storytelling, each scene flowing organically into the next… and by the strong central presence. Panigrahi is exceptional as 18-year-old Mira, struggling to balance her image as the perfect, poised student with the inner turbulence caused by her growing romantic and sexual feelings for a classmate named Srinivas; meanwhile her mother Anila (Kani Kusruti, who gets to be more outwardly expressive here than in her gazing-into-the-middle-distance role in All We Imagine as Light) keeps a watchful eye on her, and sometimes seems too interfering.

This is a slice-of-life narrative, but there are also passages of suspense in its depiction of Mira’s state of mind – such as a sequence where she is desperate to spend alone time with Srinivas (they are supposed to be studying together, he is staying overnight at her place) but her mother encourages him to sleep in her own room (further, Anila then locks the door so Mira will have to knock in the morning when she wants to wake him). Here and elsewhere, this unobtrusive film feels like a gripping thriller.

“A coming-of-age story” would be an easy descriptor – and yes, much hinges on Mira’s various awakenings, and on her recognition of her mother as anchor and protector – but Girls will be Girls is also one of those films that can shift texture, as if seen through a kaleidoscope, depending on how old you are when you watch it. The more intense scenes between Mira and Anila – and the viewer’s degree of empathy with either character – might unfold very differently if you are viewing them as a young person, as opposed to later in life. Mira’s perspective is the dominant one; we feel her frustration and anger. But it is entirely possible to look at things through Anila’s lens as well. As an almost-single parent, somewhat estranged from her husband but dependent on him financially (and answerable to him for Mira’s progress: “If your studies suffer, your dad will blame me – not you”), she is dealing with immense pressures. She has her own demons, loneliness and insecurity… and, blasphemous as it can be to suggest this, on occasion perhaps she envies her child too, growing up in a slightly more permissive time when it might be possible to get into a relationship quickly and then end it equally fast if it isn’t working out.

“In our times, girls were not even considered,” is one of Anila’s first lines in the film – she is talking about the impossibility of a girl student being made head prefect, something her daughter has just achieved. But the statement has other applications. In a later, relatively unguarded moment, Anila talks about her own school days when the boys and girls were segregated and met only twice a year; about a boy hiding in a garden because he wanted to propose to her (they caught him, and she turned him down anyway). She is also clearly stung by Mira’s father joking that when *he* proposed to her at age 21, he was too young to know what he really wanted. While she is a responsible and concerned mother, she is also a human being capable of regret and bitterness, as any of us can be; lonely enough to monopolise the attention of a personable young boy in the process of shielding her daughter.

This ambiguity, this hint of multiple motivations, is what I found most compelling about the film. There is a reminder here that some emotions – such as the excited anticipation of a new relationship (even a platonic one) – can stay constant across life stages. And that as youngsters we don’t realise that our parents – who can seem impossibly old and removed even when they are only in their thirties or forties – can have versions of the same yearnings and frailties that we do.