Marieme (Karidja Touré) is a teenage girl who lives on a poor estate in France with her mother and other siblings, including a brother who, without a father figure in the home, has taken to bullying his younger sisters as if were the head of the household. The girls live in fear of him, but Marieme has the additional worry of having to look after her sisters since their mother works most of the time as a cleaner, a job the girl may be forced to take herself once she finds out her grades are not good enough to go on to high school, and the vocational courses are beyond her abilities. As she contemplates not being able to better herself in life, she happens to catch the eye of a small gang of other girls, and a friendship develops...
Girlhood was rather cheekily renamed from the French title Bande des Filles to ally it with Richard Linklater's notable coming of age movie/experiment Boyhood, but aside from (eventually) following adolescents, director Céline Sciamma's work was not much to do with this, preferring a social slice of life yarn that attempted to prick the consciences of those who did not have much experience of young females who have little to no prospects for their futures. She plucked a selection of teenagers from obscurity to essay this, her real find being Touré who found a new career as an actress she might not otherwise have had. Quite what we were supposed to take away from Sciamma's point of view was rather less obvious.
As with her previous films to focus on young girls, she was not about to state outright what she was meaning by various scenes, and she tended to leave out important information so that the audience could fill in the blanks. This was less obvious in the early stages, but as the story progressed we were left guessing Marieme's motivations, particularly as to the direction of her sexuality where the presence of so many aggressive males and supportive females throughout her days was apparently pushing her towards a confusion of both examples in her personality. Sciamma was a lesbian, and some of her critics accused her of having a rather unhealthy interest in adolescent girls that would not have been tolerated in a male director.
But even if you did think that, there was little doubt that she held great affection for her teenage characters here, so carefully did she adapt the real lives she researched into her film so that they had a chance of becoming movie stars, or at least celebrities, for a while - even as long as the duration of the movie. She chose well, for the central gang of four girls were absolute naturals, funny when they needed to be but intimidating should that arise in the screenplay too: many pointed to the musical scene where they danced and sang along with a Rihanna song Diamonds as a genuine highlight, coming across like a pop video being watched by Marieme (renamed Vic by her pals), who then proceeded to join in, having finally found acceptance in a cultural subset that welcomed her.
But while there were scenes of the young ladies getting on famously, there were also sequences to remind us that life was not a bed of roses for individuals so far down the social ladder. Time and again Marieme will attain some degree of standing in her circle only for events to knock her back down to where she was, bright but uneducated, having loyal relationships but also existing as rivals to others just as loyal to one another, by all rights having prospects which are then thwarted so that she is stuck in a menial job. That last circumstance led on to the last act of the film where we meet her after she has rejected her old life and wound up running errands for the local gang boss, which may or may not include some unsavoury tasks to perform (again, Sciamma was rather coy about this for some reason). Here she is either undergoing gender confusion or adapting to survive some pretty tough experiences; Touré managed to make this older girl convincingly the same character as the younger, but she was not helped by a script that really should have made things clearer. Sure, end on an ambiguous note, but don't let that note carry on for half an hour. Music by Jean-Baptiste de Laubier.
