Latest Posts

Tags

  • Yaron Zilberman (1)
  • Soho (1)
  • Richard Burton (1)
  • Lady Margaret Road NW5 (1)
  • Architecure (1)
  • Modernism (1)
  • Votes for women (1)
  • Holloway Prison (1)
  • Emily Davison (1)
  • London Film Festival (1)
  • Archives

  • June 2017 (1)
  • December 2016 (1)
  • July 2016 (1)
  • February 2016 (1)
  • November 2015 (1)
  • October 2015 (1)
  • September 2015 (2)
  • July 2015 (1)
  • June 2015 (1)
  • May 2015 (1)
  • Articles by Susan

    Film review: Girlhood, Directed by Celine Sciamma

    Coming of age films about young women are rare. Coming of age films about young black women even rarer. Sciamma is a deft filmmaker, quickly setting out that this is a film about female friendship and discovery.


    The film opens with a raucous game of American football, music pounding in the background.  Once the game ends the helmets are off and the players are revealed to be a group of black girls who high five and embrace before making their way home to the banlieues, the impoverished housing projects on the outskirts of Paris. Intimidated by boys on their journey through the concrete walkways, they wave goodbye until only Marieme (Karidja Touré) remains.

    It’s a good starting point for the film, because the lives of girls like this are never usually looked at. They might be ogled or jeered, but their lives are never examined in public. And from this cold hostile environment we see the girls transform it into something warm and redemptive.

    Set in modern day France, with its glittering array of prizes to be had, the girls might as well be heroines in a Jane Austen novel for all the cultural restraints they suffer.  As black adolescents  from poor immigrant backgrounds, the four girls have few opportunities for a life outside of marriage and low-paid and low-skilled jobs. But this is no social realist piece of film-making. There is space and beauty here to focus on the transformation of these girls, as Sciamma offers us warm close-ups of the girls who might not be heading towards the Sorbonne, but who really do become Austen heroines, confronting themselves and examining their options.

    The summer is just beginning and Marieme, who is never off the screen, has failed her exams and can see that her dreams of further education have come to naught. Faced with a job cleaning hotel rooms alongside her mother, and bullied by her older brother, she opts for another track. She loosens her cornrows, pockets a knife, and becomes part of an all-girl gang who indulge in shop-lifting and intimidating onlookers.

    The girl gang are an ambiguous lot. We know their actions are reprehensible but they’re intriguing nonetheless which says much for Sciamma’s nuanced and unjudgmental approach to depicting the lives of alienated teens. These four young women are all dealing with the issue of what to do with their lives in a society which has little interest in them or respect for their ambitions. This is a story about identity, which Marieme and Lady, the gang leader, struggle with.

    Little happens in the course of the film; the girls flit about, shoplift and fight, but a pivotal scene takes place in a hotel room that the girls have rented. Here they put on the dresses they have stolen, drink and lip-sync to Rhianna’s Shine Bright Like a Diamond. It’s a scene of pure abandonment, where the liberating nature of their relationship is shown. These girls are not showing off their beauty for the benefit of men, but for the sheer pleasure of enjoying themselves.  

    The actresses in the leading roles are fresh and brilliant. None of them has acted before and the teen dialogue is believable and natural. But it’s the big bold images splayed over the screen that power the film along: the girls armoured in their football gear, concrete walkways, playing video games and doing the washing up. 

    Tucked away in the plot runs a quiet and particularly beautiful love story between Marieme and Ismael. She is loved and loves in return, and it shows Marieme in one of the many identities she adopts: disappointing daughter, bullied sister, gang member and lover, and that is what coming of age is really all about.

    Not without its problems (the girls, apart from Marieme and Lady, are mere ciphers) this film though is a cinematic vision. It sets up the viewer to expect an obvious examination of racism and stunted opportunities and gives us instead a great sense of young sisterhood and love, of girls forging their own identities that still might include all the disappointments and joys that domesticity, work, and the urban landscape brings.