Girlhood (2014)
Directed by Céline Sciamma
Oppressed by her family setting, dead-end school prospects and the boys law in the neighborhood, Marieme starts a new life after meeting a group of three free-spirited girls. She changes her name, her dress code, and quits school to be accepted in the gang, hoping that this will be a way to freedom.
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What critics compared Girlhood to
Marieme (Karidja Touré) lives the “banlieue life” amid the housing projects of Paris, cemented in the cinematic imagination by the grainy monochrome hues of Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 film La Haine .
An (American) football game is in progress, but the players beneath the pads are all female, mostly black, and speak a slangy colloquial French: they are, as the French title has it, a “Bande des Filles,” a gang of girls from the same notorious Parisian suburbs that spawned “La Haine.”
It's been almost 20 years since Mathieu Kassovitz's trenchant foray into a tough outer-Parisian banlieue in La Haine, and on many levels there are parallels with the ethnically mixed, economically disadvantaged underclass examined in Sciamma's film.
Newcomer Karidja Touré plays Marieme, an initially shy high-school student growing up in one of the high-rise tower blocks made so notorious in 1995's La Haine, a film to which Sciamma owes much.
Sciamma’s first three films—Water Lilies (2007), Tomboy (2011), and Girlhood (2014)—were all contemporary tales of adolescence and coming of age in modern France, told with frank sensitivity.
Una tardanza que, de todos modos, quizá tenga que ver con el necesario crescendo del relato, con el proceso de conocimiento, complicidad y arrebato de las dos mujeres, en una hermosa relación lésbica que la directora de las notables Tomboy (2011) y Girlhood (2014) muestra a través de imágenes físicas de celo y pasión muy verosímiles.
The simple, intimate plot is handled with authenticity by writer/director Céline Sciamma, who has here a major triumph after the positive impressions left with former works, Tomboy (2011) and Girlhood (2014).
French director Céline Sciamma has been well-known amongst those who are into European cinema for some time now, with her films Water Lillies, Tomboy and Girlhood.
The answer to all of these questions is “yes” which highlights the complex, beautiful nature of this feature film from French director Céline Sciamma (Water Lilies, Girlhood).
Later, Sciamma made Girlhood (2014), closely following a quartet of economically struggling young black women on the outskirts of Paris, a group the director has claimed are often underrepresented in modern French film.
Once you're on the ride, you drink in the characters, with the resulting effect similar to that of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood or Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood .
And the music is something else again — a great soundtrack composed largely of songs many of us wouldn’t be caught dead listening to under normal circumstances, Arnold finds frequent use for everything from Southern rap to Bruce Springsteen to Rihanna (in fact, this is the second recent outstanding anthemic film about young womanhood, after Céline Sciamma‘s “Girlhood,” to capture the alchemical effect of Ri-ri’s music on disenfranchised millennial females).
Greta Gerwig has a long way to go as a filmmaker before she can pretend to approach a Ken Loach or a Louis Malle, much less Céline Sciamma's tour de force "Girlhood" from 2015.