EXCLUSIVE! Girls Will Be Girls director Shuchi Talati on sisterhood reigning in Indian cinema: ‘I am an observer of life, and I try to write from…’ | Not Just Bollywood

Deeply engaging, Shuchi Talati’s movie, Girls Will Be Girls explores the psychology of the young adults and a mother who is craving for love and attention. The film is much more than a mother-daughter relationship. It isn’t a frivolous teenage love story. You will realise that the teenage minds can be hugely complex.

_Girls Will Be Girls_  follows the 18-year-old Mira, played by Preeti Panigrahi who falls in love with Sri (Kesav Binoy Kiron) a diplomat’s son. Equally complex is Mira’s relationship with her mother, Anila (Kani Kusruti).

Edited excerpts from the interview:

**_Girls Will Be Girls_** talks a lot about women’s desires and vulnerabilities. What made you come up with the idea and agree to do a film around it? 

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I think the first thing was, my memories of school, not just my own experiences, but I feel like, collectively, we all know this school, whether you went to a convent or you went to another type of school, the specifics didn’t matter generally. This experience of being heavily policed as a teenage girl about what you’re wearing and how you’re behaving and what is appropriate and moral, I think we have all experienced. And yet around me, you know, I saw girls who did have boyfriends and how we talked about them. We shamed them if we thought they were doing anything that was inappropriate. And so having seen that, when I had a boyfriend, I hid it from everyone, including my best friend.

So this legacy of shame I was reflecting on, and I thought I really wanted to tell the story about a young girl’s sexual awakening, her first romance, her desire, where the storytelling did not shame her. I did not want it to be the bad girl who does some bad thing, but it’s actually the good girl, the topper, the character that we love who is experiencing something totally normal. And in the storytelling, it’s treated as normal and mundane. The storytelling gives her agency. She’s allowed to have fun. She’s not punished for this, that was important to me.

What was it that you wanted to portray through Anila’s  character?  Is she really trying to be protective about a girl or does she want the attention of men? 

I try not to simplify characters, and have only one thing. Because people are complicated. A teenage girl’s desires are understandable, but hers is the most complex character. Hers is a complex character that I love, and I feel like I don’t try to say she wants one thing or the other because I think we’re not like that as humans. She loves her daughter. She wants to protect her. She wants to try and give her freedoms that she didn’t have. She’s trying to mother her in a new way, a complete opposite of the way she was mothered. At the same time, she’s lonely. She doesn’t get a lot of love and attention from her family. Her husband is also aloof. There doesn’t seem much romance in that relationship.

Anila (Kani) doesn’t get a lot of care from her daughter who seems to not understand her or appreciate her and mostly finds her annoying. So when her daughter’s friend says, “Anila auntie, you are so cool”, or this young man who is interested in her as a person, what was school like for you, what happened in your life.” She feels happy.

On working with Kani Kusruti …

I think Kani is such a brilliant actress that she can make you feel all of these conflicting emotions and intentions that are rolling inside of her. Because ultimately, she’s a young woman. I wrote her as a 39-year-old, you know. She’s a young woman who is supposed to just be in a supporting role that we expect. We have seen mothers on our screens. Totally self-sacrificing, never having any desire. And mothers in our life also are sometimes expected to follow this model. But I wanted to show her as a full person.

And another thing that I liked about Girls Will Be Girls is that it’s not judgmental. But then writing the script of Anila (Kani), I felt it must have been the toughest. Did you meet somebody like her?

I mean, we know or we all know people like this. I at least, I think. I’m just trying to think, like growing up, I saw the hot moms who came to drop their sons off. Like, they would look very sharp and those aunties would come and just hang out a little bit to chat with the senior boys or the teachers. I saw women around me who were probably unfulfilled in their marriages, who had a sense of this little box that I’m putting it in is my life. And in this box, I sometimes try to get little fulfilment, little thrills. I saw women flirting with shop owners out of habit.

And I appreciate that you said it feels non-judgmental because I have deep compassion for this character of Anila (Kani).

It is a brilliantly made, very sharp film. How did you understand these different layers of each and every character, including the boy, including the boyfriend of, Mira? 

I wrote the film over several years. And it keeps deepening and maturing. And I really believe that good stories, complex stories take time. You don’t have all of this clarity when you start writing. Maybe the early drafts, like, the boy was less likable maybe. And then you realize she would not fall in love with this boy. Like, what is actually going on with him? He’s not just a manipulator, but he’s somebody who has learned this as a defence mechanism. His parents seemed kind of absent. He’s moved around. So you start to add all these layers and to be like, he’s also looking for a home. He’s also looking for a parental figure. And then in a home where he’s valued, the mother figure cares about what he eats while his parents don’t even care to come for his 19th birthday.

I try to have compassion for all my characters, including the bullies in the film. You see that their parents are their fathers who are bullying their boys. They come from this. They’ve also experienced that or the teacher Ms. Bansal, that I tried to understand where they are coming from. I don’t like their actions, but I tried to understand what their internal logic is. So that takes time. And slowly, I feel like I’m building it in layers. Can I add another layer here? What else is truthful about this moment?

On women’s role changing in cinema, with sisterhood reigning, what do you have to say about that? 

I think that’s great. It’s been such a landmark year for Indian women, in cinema. All We Imagine is Light. It’s again Sisterhood reigning.

If you take the blockbuster, even the typical Bollywood film, Crew, it’s all about sisterhood reigning, and All We Imagine As Light is also about women in solidarity with each other and so is Laapataa Ladies. Why do you think the narrative has changed on one woman’s relationship with other? 

I think it’s really important to have these other narratives. I think, for a long time, there have been narratives about women in competition with each other, women pulling each other down. These are the stereotypes that we see in our cinema, and that’s really not my experience of life. Like, the people that I turn to mostly are women, the one who hold each other up, who help, you know, each other.

I’ve called Payal Kapadia for help when I had some questions about co-productions because she had done this before knowing nothing. I have lots of filmmaker friends here in New York who support each other. So I think it’s important to tell other stories, and respect our lives as they are. And I’m glad that it has happened.

And what next for you? Are you working on anything? 

I’ve started working on a new project. Too early to talk about it, but, you know, hopefully, this will get made. Hopefully, I will also get to collaborate with Richa and Ali again.

Cinema is changing and so are the roles. Each and every character has been given importance in your movie. What do you have to say about it? 

Every character is the protagonist of their own films, of their own lives. So it’s just this film ends up focusing on Mira and Anila and then Sri, but each of them is a full, three-dimensional living, breathing human. And I think that’s important. I think this idea between, like, a character role and a regular role, I think, what is this distinction? Everyone is a character and is equally important. Many filmmakers are doing it now, but then it wasn’t so in the past. Like, if you have a sister or a friend or a friend’s role or something like that, It’s hardly a role.

Even a woman’s role was not given much importance. It was all about hero and hero-worshiping and a woman doing an ornamental one. I’m wanting to write complex, three-dimensional nuanced portraits of women. And one of the guiding lights for me when I’m writing or when I’m directing is that I’m not trying to take inspiration from other films. Because sometimes, when we take a look at other cinemas, we write about somebody who is a certain way. I’m like an observer of life, and I try to write from what I see around me.