Ever since it premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and further on travelled to various Film Festivals, Shuchi Talatis’s coming-of-age drama Girls Will Be Girls has been getting rave reviews from all quarters leaving the team absolutely ecstatic and jubilant. The film is currently streaming and having a dazzling run on Amazon Prime Video and besides several honours and accolades the film recently picked up two nominations — the John Cassavetes Award and Best Supporting Performance for Kani Kusruti — at the upcoming 40th Independent Spirit Awards.
The director of the film is overwhelmed with the reactions she has been getting for her Indie with “a lot of people reflecting on their mothers differently”. Despite the film's flirtations with teenage love, this coming-of-age is not a love story, but a young girl's quest for sexual autonomy and reconciliation as she begins to understand her mother as a woman first. Set in a strict boarding school nestled in the serene Himalayas, the movie follows Mira [Preeti Panigrahi], a teenager who discovers the complexities of desire and love. Her journey toward self-discovery is complicated by her mother, Anila (Kani Kusruti), whose own adolescence was stifled and never fully lived. The tension between Mira’s blossoming sexuality and Anila’s unresolved past creates a simmering conflict that shapes both their lives, as the former navigates the challenges of love and rebellion while the latter grapples with her unfulfilled dreams of youth. “Many among the audience are able to relate to the characters … ‘Oh, I feel I was Mira, I was Sri ...this feels like my life is on screen. A lot of them are reflecting on their mothers saying we always see mothers like self-sacrificing martyrs, this made me feel that my mother also has desires, goals and dreams and needs care and attention. Both men and women wanted to call their mothers... ‘I should meet my mother and give her a good head massage,” says Talati over a call from New York.
Mother ‘Anila’s’ character is one of the director’s favourites and very important in this story of complex relationship between the mother and daughter which almost develops into a kind of romantic and emotional love triangle with the daughter's boyfriend in the picture. “That is because I wanted to tell the story of these two generations of women -- the mother and the daughter -- who have had very different experiences as women. The mother’s generation ...maybe they did their rebellions and they fought their fights and because of that their daughters have more freedom now. The mother Anila says, ‘Oh I was forbidden from seeing any boys or talking to boys and I don’t want to do that to you, let your boyfriend come home, let me meet him. She is trying to parent her daughter differently than she was parented and yet at the same time all these feelings of envy, sadness, longing are coming up because it is reminding her of the youth she didn’t get to live. So that complexity was very important to me and ultimately, I always say that this film is a love story between the mother and the daughter. That is the true love story, it is not between Mira and her boyfriend,” says Talati.
What inspired Talati to choose this subject for the film, she says, comes from a place of rebellion that she experienced in her own life. “The genesis is from my school life and all of our school lives. I feel any school that I knew of was this school where as soon as you became a teenager there was a lot of policing and surveillance especially if you are a girl. There was this monitoring what you are wearing, how long is your skirt, who was calling you, why is this boy calling you, where are you going, who will be there …That kind of surveillance made it very clear that any exploration of desire, sexuality or romance was absolutely forbidden and wrong and we internalize this. So, when we saw other girls who we knew had boyfriends, we whispered about them in a mean, judgmental and slut-shaming way and when we had boyfriends, we hid from our friends fearing that the judgement would be turned on us. So that environment was a big thing for me to tell this story about this girl Mira who is a topper, a good girl with character that we love and who falls in love. It is a very normal teenage thing to experience romance, to experience a sexual awakening and the thrill of that. I wanted the storytelling to treat this as a very normal thing, as a fun thing, as a mundane thing...” explains the director.
“The film was coming-of-age for me as well,” says the film’s female lead Preeti Panigrahi excitedly. “When I got the script, I had a discussion with my family that the film deals with sexuality, adolescence... and I am very happy that it initiated a conversation between me and my mother with my sister also included. The best takeaway in my personal life was that I was able to talk to my mother openly and have this ever-growing relation with her where I am at this stage of life and this is where she is at a particular stage of life. I also got to know a lot of things about her girlhood,” says the young actor. “Everything is making sense now when the film is out, I have heard so many instances where the film has done everything but they are not able to get a release, so it feels miraculous, it is the passion of all the people involved to make this film work and we did it. For me even getting this role was a victory, I finished this film and feeling satisfied as a performer was a victory. Now when I am reading what people have written after watching the film that tears me up, they are sharing their experiences with their mothers. I am feeling, Wow! They connected this to their mothers,” Panigrahi further adds.
For casting, Talati worked with casting director Dilip Shankar who has worked on several critically acclaimed and award-winning films like Life of Pi, Monsoon Wedding and Angry Indian goddesses among others. “We did a wide search for Mira and Sri (Kesav Binoy Kiron, male lead) because we were looking for very special actors. Intimacy aside, they both had to play very complicated roles, they needed to be special smart and intuitive actors,” says Talati. And solo workshops and sessions helped big time, says Kesav Binoy Kiron. “We tried to understand the language of the director, we worked on intention for every scene and it could be multiple intentions, say for instance, belittling or cute ...so it was layering up all of these according to the emotion. We would test it out and try different takes and every intention behind each take would be different and we would improvise. Shuchi used to whisper into one of the actors’ ears something that was not there in the script probably, resulting in some beautiful moments,” says Binoy Kiron.
“Nothing was emotion based, everything was intention based,” says Panigrahi further elaborating upon the process. “Sometimes just being is very difficult …the action can be very simple, say you have to just go and put pins on the board and put up a notice but as humans we have so many thoughts going on in our head. For this particular role we just focused on one thought, only one line that Shuchi would come and tell me and I would keep repeating that line in my head while doing a certain action," the actress adds.
The film has a few intimate scenes, while shooting such scenes are always challenging, the director says that she approached these scenes like any dialogue scene. “I am not interested in the choreography of the kiss and touch, that is not what makes an intimate scene intimate or vulnerable. Actually, it is the emotional exchange that is happening that makes an intimate scene intimate. So, for me the most vulnerable moment was when Mira and Sri are together and when she confesses to Sri that she has insecurity about her body, she is scared that he will judge her and not like her. That is something so personal, that is something you don’t want to say even to your best girlfriend. I told this to the actors even during the casting process that the challenging thing is that you have to tell an emotional story during these scenes,” says Talati.
“In fact, the intimate scenes were the most fun and comfortable, these scenes don't have choreography,” laughs Panigrahi. “In Shuchi’s films the intimate scenes have a certain dialogue going on in the character even when we are not speaking to each other. There were a lot of women on the set…while shooting that scene with the soft toy we exchanged a lot of notes. All the men were out and we women were talking about our first experiences, it was fun. For technicians and other crew members it was also a very unique experience. Also, this was a very calm and happy set, otherwise anger on set is so common to flow with people yelling at each other and that affects the mood of everyone. Here everything was calm, people were very sensitive and as performers when we see everyone relaxed and nobody is going to put pressure on you, you feel the best,” adds the actress.
According to Binoy Kiron, the intimate scenes helped move the story further. “There was no intimacy coordinator but Shuchi ma’am’s specialty is intimate scenes which we have seen even in her short films and she is very good at it. She uses it as a tool for storytelling. That moved the story further and intimacy scenes were the only time when Preeti and I were allowed to see the monitor. It was an open communication; we could tell them if we were not comfortable with something and that it should not be included in the film. We worked with an intention for each intimate scene just like how we approached the other scenes,” says Binoy Kiron, who was quite intrigued with different cultural reactions the film was getting as they were travelling with this film to different countries.
“At Sundance someone said, ‘Oh I didn’t know Indian films are so deep and so real as well. We always thought Indian films were all about song and dance’. I found the US audience very loud while Japan was quiet. The US audience gave loud reactions, they were cringing, feeling uncomfortable, laughing and the biggest and the loudest reaction came when my character Sri feeds Anila (‘Mira’s mother played by Kani Kusruti) the cake. For them using hands to eat was strange and then feeding someone of much older age was something totally not acceptable and they found that scene to be quite intimate, whereas, in India feeding the mother before the daughter is quite normal,” says Binoy Kiron.
Praising the film's producers, Richa Chadda and Ali Fazal, Talati says they exceeded her expectations. "Richa is an old friend, we went to college together where we co-directed our first documentary when we were studying at the Social Communication Media program at Sophia’s College. It is called Rooted in Hope and it is about this organization in Mumbai that used to employ adults who have special needs like the Down Syndrome, Autism ...I always thought Richa was so intelligent, she really understands humans, storytelling creatively. I have always had a great amount of respect for her. It was like a natural evolution to work together. She had really liked the script. Ali officially became producer a bit later but he was always invested. He read every draft of the script, he always took sharp notes, he watched all the auditions so both of them love cinema and are very invested in keeping the heart of this film pure making the film we had set out to make," says the director.
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