‘Some teachers thought a girl wasn’t up to it,” says a veteran female teacher with a weary roll of the eye. It’s some time in the 1990s, and a posh boarding school in northern India has just appointed a girl as head prefect, its first ever. Her name is Mira (Preeti Panigrahi), and she’s a sensible, academically gifted 16-year-old, known as a bit of a stickler. But Mira’s term as head prefect happens to coincide with first love; she falls for Sri (Kesav Binoy Kiron), a new boy with heavenly tousled hair and what looks like a well-practised sensitive smile.
So, this is the story of Mira’s teenage sexual awakening – a tale as old as the Himalayas, which poke into view whenever she leaves the school grounds. But there’s something new here: Mira is a teenage girl who feels plausible and behaves in ways that don’t play out like earlier coming-of-age movies. Take the way she approaches losing her virginity – like it’s science homework. Methodical Mira does her research, looking up the anatomy in the library, performing experiments at home: French kissing her arm and masturbating to work out what’s what and where. It’s a quiet film, and Panigrahi plays Mira with such poise and intelligence, conveying her innermost thoughts with a slight lift of the chin here or lingering look there.
The school is intensely patriarchal, and teachers are constantly shaming the girls. Don’t talk to boys. Don’t wear short shirts. You’re inviting trouble. When Mira reports a group of boys for upskirting, a teacher tells her to ignore them. “But they are scaring the younger girls!” What’s so brilliant about Mira as a character is that she has wriggled free of the stranglehold of the patriarchy. My only problem with the film is the way it sets her up against her own mum (Kani Kusruti) as a rival for boyfriend Sri’s attention. Still there’s something almost Malory Towers-like about the way the school is portrayed, with its idiosyncrasies, its own language and way of doing things. As for Panigrahi, it’s hard to believe this is her first lead role.
• Girls Will Be Girls is in UK and Irish cinemas from 20 September.
