Bande de filles
Céline Sciamma (2014)
The French title connotes Jean-Luc Godard rather than Richard Linklater. Was the English title of Girlhood decided before Boyhood made such an impact last summer? The protagonist of Céline Sciamma’s film is Marieme (Karidja Touré), a sixteen-year-old French girl, who lives in a housing project in the Paris banlieue of Saint-Denis. Marieme has two younger sisters but her domestic life is dominated by her aggressive elder brother Djibril (Cyril Mendy) – their mother, who works nights as a cleaner, is barely in evidence at home. Marieme doesn’t have the grades for further academic study and doesn’t want to go to vocational school. She’s persuaded to join a trio of three other girls – Lady (Assa Sylla), Adiatou (Lindsay Karamoh) and Fily (Mariétou Touré). Under their influence, Marieme learns to steal, fight and express herself; while she’s a member of the group, she adopts a new name (Vic). Marieme also has a tentative liking for a gentle local boy called Ismaël (Idrissa Diabaté); her continuing uncertainty about getting closer to him reflects growing uncertainty about her sexuality. Ismaël definitely likes Marieme but he too is tentative, through fear of what his friend Djibril will say if he finds out about any kind of relationship between his sister and Ismaël. (When Djibril does find out, Ismaël’s nervousness is justified.) Girlhood describes Marieme’s struggle to achieve individuality, in the face of various cultural forces that make it difficult to do so. Those forces include her mother’s expectations (that her daughter will follow suit and get a cleaning job); the hierarchies of the girl gang and rival groupings; the widespread assumption that Marieme will eventually become a man’s wife; and male tyrannies in the form of both Djibril and, later on, Abou (Djibril Gueye), the neighbourhood pimp and drug-dealer for whom Marieme, in a desperate bid for ‘independence’, goes to work.
Céline Sciamma is white and middle-class. That clearly doesn’t disqualify her from making a good movie featuring characters all of whom are black and from working-class families but Sciamma has defined Marieme and her community in almost entirely social terms. The principals are all strong camera subjects and Sciamma’s contemplation of the bande de filles – their faces, make-up, costume, movement – creates some vivid images but the behavioural approach is limiting. It’s frustrating that, in spite of Marieme’s determination to be her own person, you get virtually no sense of her individual tastes or interests. Still, Karidja Touré is good in the lead – particularly as the masculinised Marieme of the later stages. (The change in her walk once she’s in mannish clothes is remarkable.) The scenes between Touré and the quietly impressive Idrissa Diabaté as Ismaël are the supplest. In the last of these, when Marieme says they can’t be a couple, Ismaël asks, ‘What next, if not marriage?’ The question may be naive but it’s pertinent and unanswered in the touching, ambiguous conclusion to Girlhood. Céline Sciamma has made an interesting enough film but, as Richard Brody suggested in his New Yorker note, the story of what happens to Marieme beyond the point that Sciamma reaches here might be a good deal more interesting.
21 May 2015
