Coming-of-age dramas are a dime a dozen. They come and go in droves to cinemas year after year, and only a few truly make an impression. As such, the genre perhaps more played out than any other relies consistently on its approach rather than its convictions. If it feels honest and relatable, it can succeed past any familiarities or by-the-number storytelling it recreates, like so many others before it. This is where writer/director Celine Sciamma’s Girlhood flourishes.
Marieme (Karidja Toure), even in her early teen years, is fed up with life. Her grades are poor, her mother works so often that she’s out of the picture almost entirely and her abusive brother (Cyril Mendy) makes her home life hell. It’s during her low point when she finds solace in a local clique of girls (Assa Sylla, Marietou Toure, Lindsay Karamoh), who transform Marieme into Vic and give her life some fun, expensive accessories and pop music galore. As she grows a firmer bond with the girls, her life only gets exceptionally worse over time. Through their companionship, however, she finds the strength she needs to work through her hardships.
A delicately crafted film whose soft touch also punctuates its violent tendencies, Sciamma doesn’t so much reinvent the wheel as competently creates a dynamic look at young adulthood for French females today. Girlhood feels authentic and vital when it needs to, and does an exceptional job balancing a carefree energy with a continuously sinking sense of hard reality. This is all without making the overall film feel uneven or inconsistent.
This is in large part a testament to the performers at hand. Although mostly inexperienced, they give Girlhood a raw, beating heart that is laced in sincerity and freely given a sense of honesty. Sciamma’s film is a mostly observant one, but the director knows how to play well into the feelings of the moment, and to show what truly plagues these characters realities but also not forget to keep the energy high and the spirit of young vital and alive.
This is true for least two-thirds of the film, however. As Girlhood reaches its last act, Sciamma feels she needs to give her film an extra dose of drama. She forces her lead character to embark in a lifestyle meant as shocking but mostly comes across as simulated. The movie never loses its tonal desires to feel palpable, which saves the feature from falling apart, but it doesn’t help the last act from coming across as something other than monotonous and staged. The latter truly a shame, considering how seemingly effortless the charm and spirit of the first halves were.
A finely tuned drama, Girlhood is an extremely accessible and very likable film. Its heart is apparent from the onset, its goals are gained readily and there’s no shortage of captivating, down-key moments. Baked with love but never afraid to let its characters be ferocious and detained for narrative interests, Sciamma’s film sings because it knows what it wants to be and performs those desires competently, even when overzealous in the need to push the boundaries towards the end. It’s not a particularly memorable film, but it’s nevertheless a satisfying one that’s here to remind you, when it comes to growing up, girls just want to have fun.