Celine Sciamma | France | 2014
FESTIVALS:
2014 Cannes, Venice, Toronto, San Sebastian, Hamburg, Rio de Janeiro, Warsaw, Haifa, London, Mumbai, Philadelphia, Vienna, Thessaloniki, Stockholm, Taipei
2015 Sundance, Rotterdam, Glasgow, Wellington, Zurich
Bursting onto the screen in a blast of buzzing power pop, Girlhood from Céline Sciamma (Water Lilies, Tomboy) is marked from the outset by its energetic embrace of the complexity and contradictions of underprivileged, urban teenage life. An (American) football game is in progress, but the players beneath the pads are all female, mostly black, and speak a slangy colloquial French: they are, as the French title has it, a Bande de filles, a gang of girls from the same notorious Parisian suburbs that spawned La Haine.
Choosing to locate her story in these drab, socio-economically depressed surroundings and to tell it through the eyes of a young black girl is not only a departure for Sciamma, whose previously equally well-observed coming-of-age tales have played out in mostly white middle class settings, but a risk, and yet it pays off in absolutely triumphant fashion. Girlhood is a fascinatingly layered, textured film that manages to be both a lament for sweetness lost and a celebration of wisdom and identity gained, often at the very same moment.
– Jessica Kiang, The Playlist.
French writer-director Celine Sciamma’s latest exploration of young female identity (following Water Lilies, 2007, and Tomboy, 2011) has been released with the international title Girlhood. This cookie-cutter title, while great for distribution, does a great disservice to a film that is much more defiant and unsettling than Richard Linklater’s subtle meditation on middle-class American suburban boyhood. This is no quietly incremental coming-of-age narrative, but a brash, at times distressing series of snapshots of the life of undereducated black working-class girls on the bottom rung of every social and economic ladder.
Marieme and her friends are feisty, sassy, sometimes scary girls – beautiful, smart, funny young women, whose potential is always in inverse proportion to the opportunities open to them. They are girls whose lives and spirit are painfully held in check by the unspoken rules of flawed authority figures: uninterested teachers, absent mothers, big brothers, macho boys and petty bosses. Their only defence – and the film stresses that it can only ever be a temporary refuge – is the aggressive solidarity of the bande de filles, or girl gang; the kind of antisocial, mouthy group you wouldn’t want to meet on a metro platform late at night. Less girlhood than girls-in-the-hood, the film has a lot in common with Mathieu Kassovitz’s blistering La Haine (1995), alternating in the same way between anger, frustration and hope, but without that film’s narrative reliance on macho props and posturing.
The opening moments of the film set the tone for how the energies of Marieme and girls like her are constrained by the world they inhabit: a bruising game of American football is under way, the participants dressed like modern gladiators, their hard bodies armoured with padded shoulders, helmets and faceguards. They roar as they play, deafening us with yelling that segues into jubilant laughter as the game ends and the helmets come off. Then these mighty combatants are revealed to be two teams of young women, energetic girls of every shape and size, revelling in the joy of their own strength. The noise continues in the form of raucous chatter as, high on adrenaline, they walk back in groups to their estate. But the closer they get to home, the quieter they become; nearing a group of boys hanging out on their path, they lower both their volume and their heads, and suddenly the night is over. They peel off one by one from the group, intimidated, obedient, newly vulnerable, and return to their separate homes individually and in silence. It’s a sobering and impressively effective demonstration of the place of these girls in a world of intense social pressures, and of the liberating potential of female solidarity if only it can be allowed to take root.
This potential is seen in all its glory in a number of set pieces once the film has united Marieme (now renamed Vic) with the stylish and super-confident trio Lady, Adiatou and Fily. The first takes place in a hotel room in Paris where the girls, on the back of a shoplifting spree, hole up for a night of pizza and partying. Sprawling over the massive bed in a huddle of long limbs and hair, the girls colonise every inch of a space that is theirs and theirs alone for the duration of the night. Like kids left alone with a dressing-up box, they do each other’s makeup and try out the clingy dresses they have acquired, and dance and sing and strut for no one’s pleasure but their own. For one night only they are the stars of their own story, lip-synching to Rihanna’s Diamonds as if born to perform. Later, in an outdoor scene at La Defense, they dance for the pleasure of an impromptu audience of other girls, delighting in the sheer beauty and energy of their own bodies. To see these same bodies stilled elsewhere in the film by violence and taboo is thus all the more agonising, whatever crimes and actions the girls may be guilty of.
The film’s four main actresses were all nonprofessionals, scouted by Sciamma’s team in open casting calls in the shopping malls, train stations and working-class suburbs of Paris. Karidja Touré in particular is a revelation: Marieme/Vic appears in every scene but is always in the process of transforming herself via costume, hair and makeup, like the work-in-progress her character clearly is. Even before the film’s conclusion we can be no more certain than at any other point that her identity has been definitively fixed; indeed, we can only rejoice at the near escape she has had from the fixing that society would impose on ‘girls like her’.
– Sue Harris, Sight and Sound, June 2015.