Movie of the Week: GIRLS WILL BE GIRLS (Shuchi Talati, 2024)

A dance, in more ways than one

The first “dance” in Shuchi Talati’s supremely confident debut feature is a literal one: of a mother and daughter moving gracefully around a room to a song they both love. It’s a scene that effortlessly establishes the intimate — yet elusive — relationship between two characters whose bond will soon be tested by the introduction of a third. Teenaged Mira (Preeti Panigrahi) attends boarding school in the Himalayan foothills, often going home on the weekends to stay with Anila (Kani Kusruti). (The father is in the picture, but he works in other cities and shows his face erratically.) When Mira feels the pangs of first love with charming new student Sri (Kesav Binoy Kiron), Girls Will Be Girls appears to veer towards familiar coming-of-age territory. But Talati doesn’t make the establishment and growth of Mira and Sri’s connection her primary angle; instead, she gradually focuses her film on something far more interesting: how Mira can successfully integrate Sri into a life that is strictly, relentlessly policed. While the foundation of this restriction of young women’s bodies is, as always, patriarchy, the telling twist of Girls Will Be Girls is that it’s almost exclusively enforced by women: by Anila, once she catches on; by Mira’s teachers, headmistresses, and jealous female classmates. When Anila relents and grants Mira the experience — albeit a surveilled and limited one — of having a boyfriend, a new series of dances begins. There’s the dance of eyes as these three characters glance furtively at each other; the dance of desire as it twists and turns into new shapes; and the dance of intentions as Talati peels back her characters’ many surprising layers. The truer love story that emerges is the one between parent and child, and that profound adolescent experience of looking at your progenitor with new eyes after learning to empathize with them. This is a great movie almost completely unprecedented in the landscape of Indian cinema, and one featuring a quality that’s become all too rare: the courage to be subtle. Between this and Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, Kani Kusruti is having quite the year.

Now playing in New York, Los Angeles, and other select cities.