Shuchi Talati’s feature directorial debut Girls Will Be Girls opened to stellar reviews from critics and audience alike. The film, which won two awards at the prestigious 2024 Sundance Film Festival, initiates conversations about female desire, sexual awakening of a teenager, female sexuality, gender politics and more.
In an exclusive interview with NDTV, Shuchi Talati talked about the film’s reception against the backdrop of the Pushpa 2 tsunami, her ideas of filmmaking, and how the title of the film, deliberately, is a “cheeky nod” to the well-known adage, “Men will be men.”
Girls Will Be Girls is now streaming on Amazon Prime. When asked if her film will draw in the audiences who are thronging to watch Allu Arjun’s Pushpa 2, a certain ‘alpha male’ people high on machismo, Shuchi tells NDTV, “I don’t know. I want them to come and watch Girls Will Be Girls. It’s a very accessible, entertaining film. The distinction we make between commercial and parallel, art house or independent (whatever we may call it), this is the distinction the industry makes.”
“Maybe the audience makes this distinction less and less… These films co-exist with other films and series from around the world on OTT platforms. I feel, today’s audience are becoming increasingly media-literate. They are able to watch a wide variety of films on OTTs. Girls Will Be Girls is subtle, quiet, intelligent. It doesn’t dumb down anything for the audience. Yet it’s an emotional, visceral experience,” says Shuchi.
Sharing her firm belief in her labour of love, Shuchi adds, “People are experts in human behaviour. You don’t need to spoon-feed them. The one look from the mom, the tea not being served – the audience get the references as they have seen, felt them in their lives.”
When asked about how Shuchi conceived of the title Girls Will Be Girls, she revealed what went behind this catchy phrase.
“When we say boys will be boys or men will be men, we say to excuse their bad behaviour towards girls or women. Certainly, the title is a cheeky nod to that. But it has other meanings for me as well,” says Shuchi.
She continues, “There are two girls in the film – the mother is also a girl as she didn’t get a chance to live her youth.”
“There’s also a sense of sadness in this title. Mira (played by debutant Preeti Panigrahi) is put in a position of power in the beginning. She becomes the first girl to be the head prefect of the school. Ostensibly, she should have some power.
“But you see how fragile she is. Any misstep – she is attacked from all sides and pulled down. The title Girls Will Be Girls is also relevant because we currently live in a world where women are not accorded the same freedom as it does men,” Shuchi argues.
Girls Will Be Girls revolves around the subtle, inexplicable tension between a mother-daughter duo, brilliantly played by Kani Kusruti and Preeti Panigrahi respectively.
When we asked her about the central idea of the film, Shuchi talked about how she wanted to “normalise” the growing up of a woman, which was once shamed.
“I started with the character of a topper, a good girl. I wanted to give her the freedom to explore her first romance, to have her first desires, to have agencies, to have a sexual awakening and to treat all of them as normal. When we were growing up, all these things were shamed. What we were wearing, whom we were talking to, who’s calling, if there’s a boy waiting for us – we were constantly judged upon,” Shuchi says.
“It creates a shame around something, which is a normal part of growing up. It’s ugly and sad that we were slut-shamed in those days. I want to give this good-girl character a normal growing up,” says Shuchi.
“Second, our mothers’ generation has fought battles more often, and that gave the daughters’ generation more freedom. Here, the mother is trying to parent her daughter in way different from the way she was parented. She says to her daughter that she doesn’t have to hide her friendship with a boy. At the same time, she’s also feeling a sense of longing, a sense of loss, sadness as she didn’t get a chance to live this youth. It’s a complicated mix of pride, envy, sadness and all of them,” Shuchi signs off.
Girls Will Be Girls is produced by Richa Chadha, Claire Chassagne, Shuchi Talati. The film had its premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, participating in the competition section of the festival in January 2024.
