When I got to an unnerving scene of extreme intimidation in Talati’s debut feature, I was suddenly not a journalist watching an award-winning film, but a woman who had once been a teenaged girl, minding my own business, walking up a deserted flight of stairs in an unfamiliar school where I was attending an inter-school contest, when two older boys materialised from the opposite direction, crowded me towards the banister, casually groped me, and walked away with grins on their faces without pausing for a moment, as though it was all in a day’s work for them.
It was neither the first nor the last time I was molested. And I cannot quite tell why this particular scene in this particular film brought up that particular memory. I guess it was because here, too, there was a teenaged girl, there was a school, and there were boys who got away with it.
Perhaps, I remembered because Talati’s storytelling is so real, that the scene chilled me to the bone. This, among other reasons, is why Girls Will Be Girls is one of 2024’s best films.
An India-France co-production in the English language, Girls Will Be Girls launches the actor couple Richa Chadha and Ali Fazal as producers. It stars Preeti Panigrahi as Mira, an ace student at a strict Indian boarding school in the mountains.
Mira’s equation with her mother Anila, played by Kani Kusruti, is strained. ‘I just can’t stand her,’ she tells a classmate. Anila is lively and outgoing, but also lonesome and vulnerable, as you will realise if you notice a fleeting expression of hurt on her face during a dinner-table conversation with her husband and daughter. Her dissatisfaction with her own life combined with her worries for Mira manifests itself in awkward and bizarre behaviour as she witnesses the girl’s blossoming romance with her attractive classmate Sri (Kesav Binoy Kiron).Talati gets excellent performances from her mostly very young cast and knows how to tap Kani’s well-established brilliance. She uses music sparingly, but pointedly to take the plot forward. Jih-E Peng’s camerawork for Girls Will Be Girls is observant and sensitive, especially in scenes that could have been a hunting ground for a voyeur.While Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light starring Kani, Divya Prabha and Chhaya Kadam is making waves internationally and at home, Girls Will Be Girls has more quietly, but just as firmly, been on the radar of those monitoring quality cinema across the globe all year. Talati’s film, which begins streaming online later this week, won two awards at the Sundance fest in January in Utah, and four at MAMI in Mumbai. It also has two nominations at the Film Independent Spirit Awards 2025, one of the many American awards that are considered influential among Oscar voters.
The visibility resulting from Girls Will Be Girls’ success on the awards and festival circuit enhances its innate potential to enrich the discourse on the accountability demanded by society from women, not only for our own actions but also for the actions of men – y’know, since ‘boys will be boys’.
The more challenging aspect of Talati’s script is the treatment of Anila’s connection with Mira. It takes immense intelligence and skill to portray flawed women without resorting to stereotypes, to realistically depict women undermining each other without peddling the ‘women always pull women down’ propaganda that patriarchy is so fond of, and to represent solidarity between these same women, as Talati and her editor Amrita David do.
Though it inhabits an initially lonely landscape for women, Girls Will Be Girls is ultimately an uplifting, energising collaborative rebellion against an unacceptable status quo.
