Girls Will Be Girls, one of the shining beacons of Indian independent cinema’s resurgence this year, streams on Prime Video from today. Marking the feature film debut of director Shuchi Talati, the film is set in a boarding school in the Himalayan foothills and centres around the teenage protagonist Mira’s romance with a new classmate, her subsequent sexual awakening and increasingly strained relationship with her protective mother.

Feted at many a film festival across the world, the film has been lauded for being a complex yet insightful coming-of-age drama and is co-produced by actor Richa Chadha, with her actor-husband Ali Fazal executive-producing it. Ahead of its streaming release, t2 chatted with Shuchi and Richa about their film.

Girls Will Be Girls speaks through its silences. You have shown the film at many festivals, including at Sundance, where it won quite a few awards. What has struck the audience about the film?

Shuchi Talati: People get deeply invested in the film. This young girl’s (Mira, played by debutant Preeti Panigrahi) journey becomes personal to them. Most viewers, in the same breath, call the film quiet as well as a tense thriller. I have been told things like: ‘I was covering my eyes’, or ‘I was clutching the person next to me’. This deep investment in a character takes you on a journey outside your own head. That is what cinema is meant to do.

The second thing the film has done, and what surprises me, is that it evokes unbidden memories in people’s minds... their first kiss, first crush or even something about their mothers. A friend saw it and told me she didn’t understand why she was crying. She said: ‘Your film unlocked something within me.’

So, one is that they have a visceral, full-body experience of watching the film. Second is that it brings up memories from their childhood. Many women have come out and said: ‘I am going to call my mom.’ Some men have said that they felt they now understand their moms in a different way. It is moving to put work out in the world and see how it genuinely touches people.

Richa, what emotions did this story evoke in you when you first heard it?

Richa Chadha: It didn’t feel external, it felt very intimate. We all cried a little when we watched the film the first time because making it was fraught with emotions, difficulties, lessons and learnings. Each time I watch the final five minutes, I feel a lump in my throat. I must have seen it 15 times by now!

Shuchi, how did you think of this story?

Shuchi: It came from the world I grew up in. All of us know schools like the one shown in the film, we all know teachers like these.... I didn’t go to boarding school, but it remained a fascination for me, having read Enid Blyton as a child.

I also wanted to explore how the world changes and opens up when you become a teenager. You become aware of boys watching you as your body changes and then you find yourself experiencing desire and there is the exercise of clamping down on it at the same time. Questions like: ‘What are you wearing? Why are you talking to that boy so much? Why did he give you that card? It must be your fault!’

I wanted to tell a story that counters it but also reflects it... a story that treats this girl’s desire, her sexual awakening, her romance, as normal, as mundane, as fun and one that gives her agency.

We have the mother-daughter relationship (All We Imagine As Light’s Kani Kusruti plays Anila, Mira’s mother). The character of the mother wasn’t there in my first draft but when she appeared in the second draft, it changed things. What is interesting is this older mother figure trying to give this younger girl more freedom than she had. And yet she has to protect and discipline her and navigate the complexity that comes up subsequently. As soon as the mother came into the picture, there was much more feeling. Our mothers have sometimes fought so that we have a bit more freedom. And then when they watch us have it, how can they not feel sad or even a little envious?

Richa, what do you identity with in Girls Will Be Girls?

Richa: I identify with everything. I identify with the desire of this young girl. It is quite a rebellious thing to make the smart girl have desire. Cinema usually uses the ‘cheerleader’ stereotype — the girl who is not interested in studies and is a version of the dumb blonde — as the one who has desire or a sexual awakening. Our film has a girl on the cusp of womanhood feeling that this guy (Srinivas, played by newcomer Kesav Binoy Kiron) is cool and that she needs to explore more about sex. I had good grades growing up, but I was rebellious, naughty, duplicitous and angsty in my own way... I could be abusive sometimes, but also compassionate.... I was the easy to bruise, easy to cry type. All these things made me who I was then and continue to structure my personality today.

It is natural for everyone to have desire. Mira is the head prefect and must enforce discipline. That doesn’t make her the most popular girl in class but sexuality, sensuality or self-discovery is not the domain of the popular.

What I found interesting was that the narrative looks at Anila without judgment. In the end, there is a lot of compassion for the mother and an acknowledgement of her loneliness.

The character I played in Masaan also had a lot of curiosity about sex. She was called Devi because the writers didn’t have any judgment for her, but the way the narrative subsequently unfolded did judge her. In Girls Will Be Girls, in the end, Mira doesn’t care for the judgment from the loser boys in class or from her teacher. She knows that her mother has her back and that is most important.

How does the serenity of a hill station contribute to the drama? Would the film be as impactful if set in a cacophonic, crowded city?

Shuchi: The setting is very important. Most boarding schools in India are concentrated in hilly regions. Also, when Mira becomes the head prefect and feels on top of the world, I wanted the setting to reflect that. We searched for an assembly ground which was on top of a mountain and would also visually tell her story. In contrast, her mother’s house is in the valley, surrounded by trees. We got the colour scheme of the film — blues and greens — from there.

What made you set the film in the ’90s? Is it partly because there was a certain innocence to growing up then which is lost now?

Shuchi: For two reasons. One is what you said... there was an innocence to finding love at that time. One had to look up information in either a book or the very rudimentary Internet of the time. You didn’t have a cell phone, so if you wanted to sneak around, it was easy. It wasn’t easy, however, to set up a date. One had to do a lot of elaborate things to coordinate with your crush.

The second reason is that after liberalisation in the ’90s, a teenager could buy a pair of jeans or a mini skirt or a skort, as Mira wears in the film, and that became a sign of rebelliousness. There were also some moms who did it — the early adopters — and they would be judged... the moms who wore jeans and a T-shirt for the first time and wanted to partake in this rebellion that they were seeing their daughters have access to. The ’90s became a way for me to differentiate Anila’s character from the other mothers in the film. She is the only mom who wears trousers. And she is judged for it.
Richa: I read somewhere that women don’t buy bags, do Botox or get dolled up for men. They do it for other women. A man may not know what the latest model of a luxury bag is or how much you spent on it but another woman will. What I love about this film is that these things come and go. There is no sermonising in any way. You observe them as you observe life.

‘Girls will be Girls’ can be interpreted in various ways. It could have a ‘girls just want to have fun’ kind of tone or conversely, it could mean that the plight and fate of girls everywhere is the same. That, of course, is my interpretation. What does the title mean to you?

Richa: It means all those things you said. There is a certain defiance in the title. We are often told that boys will be boys and that girls need to be careful around them. Through this title, we are defiantly saying that girls will be girls. It also means that women eventually come together when they understand how often they are pitted against each other.

Indian independent cinema, especially those led by women, is having a moment. What is your reading of this phase which we all hope will be more than just a phase?

Richa: It definitely has been a great year for independent cinema. The more power the male-dominated testosterone-heavy blockbuster film accumulates, the more independent cinema will find ways to tell stories. You can’t topple structures and that is not even the intent. But the structures themselves will change because you can’t just have that one tentpole entertainer and pin all your hopes on it. Filmmaking is very risky, it is a gamble. We have to have a check on what it costs to market a independent film and still focus on the quality of filmmaking.