Teenage Dreaming
On Shuchi Talati’s 'Girls Will Be Girls'
Movie week rumbles onward at The Metropolitan Review. Today, Siddharth Khare, a trenchant critic, writes on a debut drama that took Sundance by storm. Despite not seizing as many headlines as other heralded films, Khare argues, convincingly, Girls Will Be Girls should belong to the twenty-first century canon. While we have your attention, please pledge $50 or $5 a month so TMR can keep growing and bring you the best of culture. We appreciate your support.
-The Editors
You ride a tattered scooter. You wear clothes that are either too baggy or too tight. You won’t shave. You flirt with Marxism. You hate capitalism. You believe you’re misunderstood. You’re mad at mom and dad because you think they don’t get you. No one gets you, and you know no one gets you, but something about them not getting you frustrates you greatly. You’re always fighting. They have dreams. You have dreams. And as you grow older you have stumbled upon that half-awkward, wholly painful realization that your dreams might differ from their dreams. You think you’re hopelessly lost, but the romance of that listlessness hasn’t set in.
You like Pink Floyd and Metallica, until a girl with kaleidoscope eyes sits frightfully close to you and shares one of her two earbuds and forces you to listen to Nada Surf. Your world changes. As the lyrics of a song that you feel like you’ve known for a lifetime and many lifetimes envelop you, your world certifiably changes. The sun sets. You share furtive glances with one another. There is an ineffable desire, a desire that you haven’t yet the vocabulary for, to hold her hand. You slightly shamefully extend your pinkie, or let it linger on your walk back home, with her by your side. And the rest becomes history.
This is all a terrifyingly familiar feeling and it is captured with an astoundingly tender perfection by Shuchi Talati in her remarkable 2024 debut feature Girls Will Be Girls. Set in a boarding school in the Himalayan foothills, the coming-of-age drama follows the blossoming relationship between Mira, the newly minted head prefect, and Sri, a charming new student. Over the course of the film, as Sri begins to frequent Mira’s house — she’s a local — he also starts to get close to her charismatic mum, Anila, until Mira starts fighting with Anila for his attention. All of this could easily have devolved into a crass comedy. Instead, Talati takes up the dazzling questions of adolescence, ennui and girlhood and weaves them into a remarkably poignant tale of love and longing.
Preeti Panigrahi and Kesav Binoy Kiron deliver immaculately candid performances as characters we know all too well. Mira is the standard, overachieving sort — head prefect, top of her class, apple of every teacher’s eye, but with a discernible vulnerability, an existential boredom bordering on agony that screams: this life is not enough. To test this agony enters Sri, a new kid fresh from Hong Kong, who cares little for the mores and norms of the school — he scores poorly and refuses to recite the school song and has a complicated relationship with his father. But there’s a beguiling empathy that clings to him, a polish that’s prone to easy exoticization.
In India, romance necessitates space, and the only space Mira and Sri have at their disposal is Mira’s home. This is where we get introduced to Anila, Mira’s mum, whom Kani Kusruti plays with such grace and such fallibility that I found myself choking up in nearly each of her scenes. And it is Anila, in her harrowing loneliness and lustful jubilance, who bears and anchors the emotional and philosophical weight of the film. Mira has — surprise surprise — a troubled relationship with Anila. They bicker, confuse love with insecurity and never manage to say the right things to one another. But it is in Anila’s quasi-maternal, quasi-romantic relationship with Sri — yes the same one her daughter is snogging — that Girls Will Be Girls acquires a dazzling valence. But more of that in a moment.
The film is built around two distinct arcs. There is the intoxicating depiction of a teenage romance, brimming with the themes of sexual awakening and rebellion, reminiscent of the works of filmmakers such as Greta Gerwig and Olivier Assayas. Talati handles this narrative — grossly underrepresented within an Indian context — with an easy confidence and maturity. There is a texture of loss and love, longing and chaos, completion and recklessness that so marked my adolescence in India and the adolescence of so many of my friends, a texture that contemporary Indian cinema has all but ignored. Talati is a rare Indian filmmaker who gets this texture, who understands the grammar of adolescent love. As Mira and Sri tell things to each other they’ve never told anyone, visit cyber-cafes to discreetly inspect anatomical complexities, and hike up desolate hills in search of peace and pleasure, I could not help but feel deeply nostalgic. I’ve done all of this — or some approximation of it — I thought, with a wistful smile. I almost teared up watching a scene where Mira records a birthday message for Sri. She’s insecure, afraid, furious about his growing unavailability, desperately in love and desperate for love. And as this unfolded, I found myself both unspeakably glad to have escaped being seventeen and pathetically sad about no longer being seventeen.
However, it is the second arc that most excites me. In an audacious move, Talati devotes a significant hunk of the film to developing the ambiguously amorous relationship between Sri and Anila, suddenly making the film so much more than a simple coming-of-age drama. Anila is initially deeply suspicious of Sri. It is apparent from the very outset that Mira and Sri are more than friends and Anila is cautious about the consequences — academically and otherwise — that his presence might have on Mira. She forces them to leave the door open when they study and tells him that nothing should get in the way of Mira’s academics.
But — and this might be very fair to presume — unlike most men (or anyone at all) in Anila’s life, Sri asks questions. He asks her if she misses her home (she’s come here to be with Mira during finals), devours her food and offers her an unfamiliar kind of attention. There is nothing perverse or exploitative about their relationship. And it is in this arc where the film becomes as much about middle-aged loneliness as it does about teenage love. Anila’s life is marked by a dire ennui. Her daughter doesn’t respect her, her husband is hardly present — it’s a relationship where lack of conversation has been carefully replaced by mutual obsessions over the fate of their only child — and her days and nights all seem to melt into a profound nothingness. In many ways, she reminded me of Bob Harris from Lost in Translation, minus the fame but with all his lonely stares and existential sorrows. There’s nothing wrong with her life, per se, and yet there’s something terribly amiss. But she seems to like, perhaps even love, Sri’s company. She smirks, cackles, does elaborate dance moves and even opens up about past relationships every time he is around. She loves to cook for him, care for him, and talk to him. There are moments when boundaries are crossed. And other points where boundaries are obliterated, thus provoking the eternal question: what stands between love and lust?
It is extremely easy to miss the delicate balance that Talati strikes in representing this relationship. A little to the left and she risks ripping off The Graduate; a little to the right and she edges into American Beauty. But with a limited focus, she manages to render what must only be considered a bold and daring vision of middle-aged female loneliness. Shots of Anila quietly arranging flowers or setting the table are juxtaposed against those of her reading smut and dancing with Sri. And as we bear witness to the glimmers of her past, or who she might have been once upon a life, we slowly and rather painfully begin to realize that there was a person there.
Notwithstanding its superlative character-building, there is a curious misstep in the film. For some indecipherable reason, Talati provides an ongoing commentary on the prohibitively stifling atmosphere of schools, especially in terms of their glaringly disparate expectations from boys and girls. Thus, the film is littered with instances where a teacher pontificates on appropriate skirt lengths. Or scenes where a bunch of cretins take inappropriate pictures of some of the female students. Or when we are reminded that a romantic dalliance in this school results directly in expulsion. While a Foucauldian exegesis into these issues is admittedly tempting, Talati loses focus here.
But these are minor flaws in what can only be deemed as an extraordinary debut. Lately, I’ve been thinking about my private twenty-first century canon. Yi Yi is and has been the undisputed frontrunner. There’s also Sideways somewhere up there, Toni Erdmann, Drive My Car, Clouds of Sils Maria, In The Fade. And for a while I have wondered what makes great films great? What makes them stick? And I suspect the answer has something to do with fragility. I think great films, or at least those that I find maddeningly beautiful, are the ones that look past definitive values, dispense with moral realism, to exhibit the fragility and brittleness that lies at the core of this thing we pretentiously call the human condition. They shatter the suffocating pretenses that undergird our social, cultural, and political life and evocatively expose how our rich and joyous and serene lives are also abundantly frail and incomplete and loveless.
Girls Will Be Girls is the only addition to my modern canon from 2024. It has the gall to amp up ambiguity and drain affect — all for portraying unabashedly how little we understand one another and how we understand ourselves even less. And in drawing out very odd love triangles, Talati reminds us that maybe, beyond the norms and strictures and expectations and burdens, all we care about is being loved, and, perhaps more importantly, being understood.
Siddharth Khare is a DPhil candidate in Political Theory at Oxford. When he’s not buried in academic research, he’s busy sharing his takes on culture and current affairs through his Substack, Local Hero. He’s also hard at work on his first novel, which tackles cancel culture and celebrity ennui.
 | A guest post by
|