Girl­hood

In a hired hotel room and a stolen dress, 16-year-old Marieme (first-timer Karid­ja Touré) proud­ly bears her new street name, ​‘Vic’, danc­ing with bor­rowed moves and lip-sync­ing to some­one else’s song in a lan­guage not her own. All this appro­pri­a­tion marks the aspi­ra­tions and ambi­tions of young black French women unable to find what they crave from with­in their own imme­di­ate envi­ron­ment. Marieme’s need to look out­wards for forms of self-expres­sion is reflect­ed in the fact than no oth­er French film before Girl­hood has ever focused on the expe­ri­ence of black girls.

Even as Marieme enjoys this snatched moment with the three oth­er mem­bers of her bande de filles (‘girl gang’, the film’s orig­i­nal title), she knows that her bub­ble of hap­pi­ness will soon burst, and that the injunc­tion of gang leader Lady (Asa Syl­la) to ​“do what you want” is near impos­si­ble to realise. Exclud­ed from high school, and kept from open­ly see­ing her boyfriend by her old­er brother’s vio­lent dis­ap­proval, her future in the ban­lieue seems restrict­ed to the long hours and low pay of her moth­er, or to prostitution.

The lat­est explo­ration of female ado­les­cence from Céline Sci­amma (Water Lilies, Tomboy), Girl­hood is a fly-on-the-wall, over-the-shoul­der exposé of a young woman’s life in a very spe­cif­ic eth­nic and cul­tur­al milieu, and yet its real­ism is off­set by the stylised recur­rence of the num­ber four: four girls in the gang; sev­er­al key scenes tak­ing place under the sign of Les Qua­tre Temps in the La Défense dis­trict; and a quadri­par­tite struc­ture for the film itself. These are four steps to free­dom, as Marieme, at each stage on her jour­ney towards inde­pen­dence, cuts anoth­er tie to her past, with defi­ance and deter­mi­na­tion her only bul­warks against high­ly cir­cum­scribed Parisian prospects.