Girls Will Be Girls: my recent favorite (guilty?) watch
I was admiring the recent works of Ali Fazal, then started browsing more about him… got to know he is married to Richa Chadha.. wait I know this actress from Gangs of Wasseypur, she played the character “Nagma” of whom I became a great fan.. Richa also played the lead female role in the 2015 film Masaan, another work I admired. It was a pleasant discovery that two of my favorite artists whom I admire for playing exceptional, tasteful roles, are married to each other… I did more stalking and found out that they also produced a movie together - Girls Will Be Girls, a quick watch of the trailer confirmed my gut feeling that this is the kind of movie made for me.
The premise is a boarding school in India, situated at a hill tract. Mira, the head prefect from the senior class, a studious girl is the female lead. I saw myself in Mira, the girl who is transitioning to a woman. She is the top student, study oriented, rule abiding girl, and not very fond of her mother. The mother is young, quite frank, sometimes quite dominating—imposing strict regulations on her daughter. “She's fine, but I just can't stand her”, that's how Mira puts her mother. Anila, the mother, probably sees too much of herself in her daughter and wants to protect her from inevitable adolescent mistakes. The relationship is more competitive than affectionate.
The hill tract’s quietness adds the right element for making a story aesthetic. The movie is set in a time when walkman cassette was popular, a thing my generation didn't get to know quite well. So the disruption from the smartphones and the ever-changing influence from the social media were absent—making my watch time so soothing.
The “guilty pleasure” part of my watch is—I loved seeing this other side of Mira, which she carefully hides from her peers and definitely from her mom—her adolescent journey. The way she inspects her underarm hair (omg thanks for showing it in the movie, boys these days think that women don't grow hair on their underarms),the way she dances fluently with beats and gets stiff the instant someone else enters the room where she's dancing, the way Mira practices kissing in the shower… At eighteen, she discovered there are three orifices in the female body, it took me longer than that, LOL.
No other movie showed a girl’s adolescent journey this frankly. IMO sex is overplayed in most movies, making it look like an all-pleasant act, keeping the mental mood out of the picture. I was gratified to see the pains, the confusions, the chores of sex on the screen of this movie. With the minimum nudge of visuals the movie makes the viewers relate to the pain of the first sex for a girl, the familiar sound of thrusting, the mental competition to win a boy's heart with the intimate act of sex.
I am not usually guilty for watching something that pleases me. It's just - this is the kind of thing people refer to when they say “guilty pleasure”. Guilty or not, this movie brings the viewers closer to an adolescent girl’s psychology, social tensions. And two hours fly by, leaving an aesthetic, tender impression inside one!
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