He is Srinivas (Kesav Binoy Kiran), the charming new boy in the daughter Mira’s (Preeti Panigrahi) school where she is the model student and the first ever girl head prefect. What starts as an innocuous, irrepressible attraction between the two adolescents soon begins to upend Mira’s already rocky relationship with her mother Anila (Kani Kusruti).
Trying to be watchful, Anila begins to invite Sri to their home which he gleefully does on the pretext of having home-cooked meals and study sessions with Mira. It starts off unintentionally, but before much ado, Anila willfully encroaches on her daughter’s budding romance, casting a tall shadow, much to Mira’s chagrin.
Written and directed by debutante Suchi Talati, Girls Will Be Girls is an achingly intimate portrait of the inner contours of a mother-daughter relationship marked by mutual jealousy, rivalry, and little, everyday cruelties. The sensitivity with which Talati probes the unpleasantness and awkwardness that is inevitable in any close relationship will remind you of Greta Gerwig’s breakthrough directorial debut Lady Bird (2017), another iridescent coming-of-age drama anchored around a turbulent mother-daughter relationship.
A primal sensuality, an unspoken rebellion, an exploration of the forbidden permeates through Girls Will Be Girls so inextricably, that it becomes the film’s language. If Elio (
Timothee Chalamet) used a peach to experience sexual pleasure in Call Me By Your Name, Mira uses her soft-toy. Luca Guadagnino’s heartbreakingly gorgeous 2017 queer-romance was set in picturesque Italy. Talati, meanwhile, bases her film in a small hill-town at the foothills of Himalayas. But the two films are uncannily similar in how extraordinarily, minutely, and with uncommon empathy they examine the first rushes of adolescent love and sexual awakening.
Taiwanese cinematographer Jih-E-Peng’s camera takes us places at once thrilling and disruptive, in moments so private, that one feels like an intruder. And yet at no point does her gaze turn voyeuristic. In fact, she shoots unhurriedly, capturing moments often ignored, with a dignity, a grace for the female body and experience unbeknownst to Hindi cinema. It’s breathtaking.
At 123 minutes, Girls Will Be Girls marks several stellar debuts. Suchi Talati leads the pack, Richa Chadha and Ali Fazal serve as first-time producers under their newly-minted banner Pushing Buttons Studios, but it’s Preeti Panigrahi who is this film’s true find, it’s biggest win. As a precocious, sincere 18-year-old burdened with responsibility and morality, she plays Mira with a stubborn righteousness, an unrelenting haughtiness and yet manages to unpack her vulnerabilities, desires and insecurities hitherto unknown to her with the kind of nuance and complexity that’s the terrain of truly remarkable actors. Hers is inarguably one of the best performances of the year.
Kani Kusruti is terrific too as a woman constantly jostling for attention from a daughter who can’t stand her and looks up to her largely absent father instead. Even though they are both coming to terms with the loneliness that creeps up as youth gives way to middle age, Kusruti’s frank, over-friendly Anila is diametrically opposite to the reserved, duty-bound Prabha from Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light—another sublime debut, another festival favorite from 2024 that explores the transformative, subversive power of sisterhood.
If you go strictly by her exteriority, Mira feels more like Prabha’s daughter than Anila’s. But as they step into adulthood, girls wiser than their years quickly learn that precociousness is too heavy a burden to be straddled with. So they drop it at the first chance possible. It is only when one has experienced life enough—like Anila—that one learns to see propriety for the social sham it is and truly appreciate the joy, the freedom that comes with embracing lightness of being.
Maybe then Mira and Anila are the same women at different stages of life. Even if she aspires to becoming like her father, maybe Mira is more like her mother after all. For none can tell how the wheel of time will spin and the myriad mirages it will create.
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