★★★★☆
Four Stars
French film-maker Celine Sciamma’s new release Girlhood is a powerfully intimate film, with a focus and style that represent a significant and refreshing novelty in both mainstream and French cinema.
Girlhood centres on Marieme (Karidja Touré) – a quiet, watchful sixteen-year-old most at home on the football pitch – in the months after she is told that she cannot move up into high school as she had hoped, leaving her at sea in a world of indifferent adults. We watch as Marieme is recruited by fellow drop-outs Lady, Adiatou and Fily into a ‘bande des filles’ (‘girl–gang’ – the original French title) and is immersed in the petty crime, gang-fights and, crucially, the friendship that this brings with it.
Girlhood is a film about growing up in a life with few options, surviving in a world where everything, even companionship, seems to come at a price.
From the opening scene – an all-girls American football sequence underpinned by the rhythmic urgency of Light Asylum’s ‘Dark Allies’ – music plays a major part in structuring the story. The film is broken up into segments by Para One’s atmospheric electronic soundtrack, each one marking a new chapter for Marieme as she moves from quiet observer to being in control of her decisions, earning the nickname ‘Vic for Victory’ from group-leader Lady (Assa Sylla). One of the most moving highlights of the film sees Lady and the other girls mouthing and dancing along to Rhianna’s ‘Diamonds’ – the entire song – under a blue tint that makes a moment of warmth seem tinged with sadness.
Refusing to follow her mother into a career cleaning the same hotel that she and the gang like to sneak away to for a night of dancing, drinking and dressing up together (paid for by bullying pocket money out of children at the school gate) Marieme cherishes what little freedom she has and the excitement that comes with it. But losing the respect of her family and community means this freedom slips away, and she ends up leaving home to work for a drug dealer, dressing as a boy in order to avoid unwanted attention.
Although this cannot last and she is forced to leave, still she does not concede defeat to her circumstances, choosing terrifyingly uncertain independence over the life of sheltered domesticity that would regain respect and welcome back home. It is this decision that marks the point at which Marieme is most powerful, despite the desperation of her situation, her conviction becoming a small glimmer of hope in a world which has become increasingly dark and isolating.
Touré is captivating in the lead role, maintaining a vulnerability that never quite falls into weakness. That the actors were all scouted from the streets of France is almost incredible given the unfailing strength of the performances.
Visually alone, Girlhood deserves extremely high praise for its artistry. The beautiful outlines of Crystel Fournier’s cinematography are interspersed with close-ups of the characters – faces, hands and smiles all in captured in shallow focus in turn. The result is at times the detached perspective of an artist, changing suddenly into an almost intrusive closeness. As a result, the tower blocks of the estate where it is set are at once claustrophobic symbols of the restrictions of the girls’ limited futures as well as structures within which tender family ties are safely contained.
Scenes with Marieme and her younger sister in their shared bedroom become fragile moments of innocence, before the entrance of an abusive older brother shatters the calm. Meanwhile it is the moment when the girls play a hilariously competitive game of crazy-golf, which seem most moving for their simplicity. Sciamma makes it impossible to forget that for all the intimidating talk and sexualised outfits, the girls are just that, girls – despite their hardened, adult exteriors.
Girlhood is the only mainstream film I can think of to feature a core cast of young black female actors, fulfilling the director’s self-confessed aim of bringing this under-represented demographic onto the screen. That said, the film does not explicitly place issues of race and gender at its centre, instead allowing the characters’ stories to unfold unimpeded by these discourses. The lack of interference is such that by the end, I was left almost wishing for a more contrived, typical happy ending, only to realise the necessity for its more realistic alternative, which offers no such quick-fix solution, but ends in the midst of uncertainty.
Girlhood resists the norms of subject, setting and casting, yet it does so in a way that brings us closer to the normal, to the reality of teenage experience. Even if the accuracy of the portrayal of banlieue life has been questioned, it is film that resonates through its suggestions of what it means to be teetering on the edge of girlhood, to be finding security and a place in which to belong when everything is liable to change in the blink of an eye, or at the end of a song.
