GIRLHOOD (Bande de
Filles)
B+
France (113 mi) 2014 ‘Scope d:
Céline Sciamma
Melissa Silverstein interview with the director from indieWIRE, January 30, 2015, 'Girlhood' Director Céline Sciamma on Feminism ... - Indiewire
I chose the
title of the film before knowing Boyhood existed.
I saw the film, and all of the attention it got, and I like that the two movies
have been compared and mirrored. I see here that the press is doing that a lot
-- at Q&A's at Sundance I’ve had that a lot. I think it’s really
interesting.
They both
believe the same thing: Watching someone grow is cinema, and interesting, and
tells us a lot. But they use totally different perspectives. Richard Linklater
actually shows someone grow for 12 years, and I watch someone grow in 37 days
with special effects – meaning costumes and decisions.
The two
[approaches] are so opposite, but they are starting from the same belief, which
I think is really interesting. With these titles, both movies are deciding that
they are saying what is universal. Linklater is saying, and he’s right, that
what is average is a middle-class white boy's parents' divorce, college,
average student, average dreams, and he’s telling a lot about today with that
[kind] of character. I’m deciding that "universal" is actually
something that is not -- it’s actually the margin; I’m putting the margin at
the center. He’s looking at someone in the center, the middle.
I picked black
girls because I was struck by the lack of representation of black women, and
characters, onscreen in France, and Europe also. Especially in Paris, where I
live, [it's] actually a very mixed society. I wanted to go for it, but not
saying, “Oh, I’m going to depict what it’s like to be a black girl,” but
actually saying, “I’m going to depict what it’s like to be a girl,” and why
can’t that be with a black character?
Opening at the Directors’ Fortnight section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival while also playing at Toronto and the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, the casting process reportedly took four months, with actresses scouted from the street, where themes of aggression, also a sense of empowerment, are introduced in the wordless but emblematic opening frames set to the music of a Brooklyn based duo, Light Asylum - Skull Fuct [OFFICIAL VIDEO] - YouTube (5:17), as young black girls are playing American tackle football under the lights, complete with uniforms, helmets and pads, violent jarring hits and in-your-face trash talking, but also celebratory touchdowns, where afterwards the jubilant elation is shared by both sides, where teamwork is the operative word. As the crowd of revelers walks home afterwards, joyful and full of energy, we hear them all bunched together in large groups, everybody talking at once as they head back to the projects, falling suddenly quiet when they reach a line of boys who whistle, call out their name, or offer some crude comment as they walk by, where slowly their ranks thin out as each group arrives at their high-rise destination, finally leaving one lone girl, 16-year old Marieme (Karidja Touré), seen climbing the concrete stairs to her home. Immediately we become familiar with the hierarchy in the family, with no father, an absent mother (Binta Diop) that works long and extended hours as a cleaning woman, an abusive and overcontrolling older brother Djibril (Cyril Mendy) who holds a leadership position in a neighborhood gang, and her doting younger pre-teen sister Bébé (Simina Soumare), where the two of them have a close relationship. The film is divided into various chapters, but rather than identify them with titles, the director fades to black and holds the screen before moving to the next sequence. Using a pulsating, techno-synth score from Jean-Baptiste de Laubier and Para One, Para One - Girlhood (Official Audio) YouTube (2:28), the infectious music blares with its identification with youth, recalling Adrian Lyne’s FLASHDANCE (1983), an anthem for women’s independence, especially for its use of pop music as an expression of liberation. After failing to advance to high school, even after repeating a year, Marieme is told her grades are too low, that her only option is vocational school which will steer her into low-end wage jobs, exactly like her mother. Pleading for a chance to be “normal,” she is devastated to be placed on a fast track to nowhere. Dropping out of school altogether, she takes solace in hanging out with a group of ultra aggressive girls (hardly a gang, as they’re really just a group of friends), Lady (Assa Sylla), Fily (Mariétou Touré) and Adiatou (Lindsay Karamoh), all school dropouts wearing a similar hair weave, a threesome looking for a fourth member. Living life on their own terms, together they go shoplifting, extort younger students for money, get in fights with other neighborhood girls, and drink while listening to music, where easily the scene in the film takes place in a hotel room (shot in a blue light) where they get dressed up in stolen dresses and collectively dance to the joyous exuberance of Rihanna, Girlhood - Clip 1 - Diamonds - YouTube (2:09).
Fariha Roísín from Hairpin, January 30, 2015, Not The Way White Girls Do
Black girls
definitely don’t have films made about them. The best explanation for this that
I’ve ever read or heard is in Jessica Hopper’s Village Voice
piece about R.Kelly. In it, she interviews Chicago Sun-Times
writer Jim DeRogatis who laments: “The saddest fact I've learned is nobody
matters less to our society than young black women. Nobody."
Through studied intentions we are told, black girls, and WOC [women of color]
at-large, are non-identifiable; that, in order to write a story about a POC
[people of color] kid, it inevitably needs to be within the context of race.
The language is coded.
Sciamma
defies tradition with Girlhood. Her
rendition of a black girl’s life is ordinary. Her lead, Marieme (Kardija Touré)
is black, yes, but her life is not defined by this premise—she’s also curious
about boys, about how
to be; there’s a sense that she’s searching for something more, as all
teenagers often are, and she grapples with her mediocre existence as she begins
to explore what lies in the world outside of her own confines. […]
There’s a
scene in Girlhood
where the four girls—Marieme and her girl gang—are in a hotel where they drink,
gossip, and dress up; nursing themselves with self-medicated self care. At one
point, Marieme starts singing Diamonds by
Rihanna, and slowly, one by one, the others join in. Their bodies are blue,
against the effervescent karaoke glow of the TV; they are dressed in fancy
clothes—they are happy. Do you know how audacious it is for not one, but four
dark skinned girls, to be on screen singing the lyrics: Tonight/You and
I/We’re beautiful/Like diamonds in the sky” with a disregard and ease that
is only ever reserved for white kids? These girls aren’t lamenting their
darkness, they are wholeheartedly embracing what they are because they’re never
given an option not to. Like whiteness, they normalize their blackness, by
never acknowledging a difference.
Taking on a new identity, using her new name of Vic, as in “victory,” Marieme is initially shy, deferring to the stronger-willed personalities of the other girls, but things change after Lady gets her ass whipped in a one-on-one fight with another girl, all captured on cellphone video in front of an assembled crowd, where she gets humiliated, kicked and stomped, with her shirt pulled over her head exposing her brassiere. Making matters worse, her father trims her actual hair afterwards, shaming her from showing herself in public. In a somewhat idealized moment (as escalating retaliation is inevitable), Marieme stands up for her friend and gets revenge, showing a newly developed aggression that wasn’t there before, while also finding the nerve to have sex with a cute boy around the corner, Ismaël (Idrissa Diabaté), a poignant and remarkably understated moment where she surprisingly takes the lead, taking charge of the moment, one of the few films that show a young girl actually gazing at a man’s body, where she doesn’t just desire him, she wants to see the round, muscular shape of his ass. But this doesn’t bring her closer to any real gratification, as the film has a downward arc while Marieme discovers her choices are constricted to fewer and fewer options, where despite the protection offered by powerful neighborhood men, none of that brings her any joy or satisfaction, having to work for a gangland boss as an over-sexualized drug runner with hopes this might lead to more and better opportunities, but it only leaves her feeling more exploited, where she is continually under the thumb of some dominating male patriarch, where it’s as if her life doesn’t really exist. Only when she sees that her little sister is following in her own footsteps does she take a second look at herself, realizing you can’t stay young and cool forever, that you need to find more permanent solutions. Perhaps in response to what she’s forced to do for men, on her own time she begins dressing down, less sexy, wearing pants and baggy shirts, looking more and more like a boy, urging her sister to cover her figure as well, where the suggestion is she and Lady may be closer than we realize. What’s perhaps most important here are the simplicity of Sciamma’s depictions of complex relationships between young black girls where they mimic each other’s behavior, like spending time at the malls or learning dance routines, where at a deeper level these early years are a search for power and self-worth, something altogether missing from movies today. Despite the naturalism throughout, there’s also an intentional artificiality, where the housing projects have rarely been seen so empty, as they are usually teeming with noise and overpopulation at all hours of the night, where everyone is literally forced to live on top of one another, with car horns and music blasting, with residents forced to shout over the noise, where there is simply no concept of privacy. Throughout the film, however, whatever conversations Marieme has are in utter quiet, where she may as well be in a library or a sound studio. While this adds a degree of personal intimacy to her mystique, where the complexity of her sensual yet utterly authentic characterization remains at the center of the film, as the camera always feels drawn to her, but in the end, with Paris looming off in the distance, she remains at a crossroads between youth and adulthood, just another girl from the projects, where she needs to find some stability and balance before her life veers out of control.
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