#6
Post
by colinr0380 » Thu Feb 13, 2020 4:00 am
If you all don't mind, I'll copy across my older comment on Girlhood from the "Upcoming Movies on UK TV" thread to this one. Spoilers follow:
I really liked Girlhood, though I think its much better if seen less through an 'ethnographic Ken Loach social realist' lens than as being sort of in the vein of a gangster crime drama! This might just be me but I liked it even more when I started thinking that it had some strange structural similarities to something like the 1983 Scarface, as a girl falls in with local gangs, gets introduced to drugs and catfights to prove superiority amongst local gangs, all whilst having coercive family troubles (including a sister who potentially may be following in her footsteps whom she wants to keep ‘pure’ and unsullied). She eventually seems in danger of losing her kindly aspects of her nature as she begins to enjoy the power of her new lifestyle (with the suggestion that she is maybe giving into her violent tendencies in herself that have always been there) and the way that she 'hardens' as she moves from being coerced by her abusive brother and from being an onlooker on the sidelines of gangs into becoming a central figure of these situations and taking more control of her life (it is a pretty good film for showing that process of being 'indoctrinated' ever deeper into a troubling criminal underworld, not just because you have to through your life circumstances but also because there are some elements of friendship and belonging there which make linking up seem appealing too). Though in taking that control of her own life she eventually has to let go of a number of people, and become more callous and detached from the situations around her. Especially when she gets pushed into ‘actual, more official’ (i.e. male) criminal gangs, where she is more reductively (but simultaneously powerfully?) used as a glamorous figure wandering through posh parties in a white wig and red dress to dispense drugs to the clients. It might only be one small degree of separation from the prostitute she now shares a flat with, but at least she has her own football computer game that she can play with the sound on, unlike when she was living with the abusive brother! (Much to the consternation of her rather useless boyfriend, who after a really great 'ilicit first kiss' scene in a gloomy stairwell amusingly just becomes kind of the ‘gangster’s moll’ figure of the film, getting used for sex and rightly rebuffed at the very end of the film when he belatedly tries to ‘protect’ Vic by wanting to marry her just after she has dealt with all of the worst trials of life that she perhaps could have used his help in facing earlier! I also like at the mid-point of the film, when Vic is flying her highest, she decides to go and 'claim her prize' in the middle of the night, objectifying her boyfriend as an ownable status symbol much as Al Pacino claimed Michelle Pfeiffer for his own at the mid-point of Scarface!)
It’s a little strange in its implied message that the actual criminal gang at the end is perhaps where Vic really, unquestionably, belongs. Especially in a society where there are no other viable options given beyond the basics of education or menial work. The early sections of the film are perhaps a bit obvious in setting up these aspects, from the way that all the groups of girls chattering quieten down when passing by the looming gangs of guys, or the distrust of the education system, or the vaguely sketched in, barely present mother busy working a menial cleaning job, who is only able to try to get Vic into a similar cleaning job where she works. Something which causes Vic to make her first steps towards independence by threatening the boss into firing her!
It is kind of a film about Vic moving through her ‘girlhood’ in the form of groups essential for her development that have to be ‘grown through’ in some ways. The mother is barely there even at the beginning, with the coercive brother being the big issue to deal with. Then after being rejected from school for poor test results (the break with ‘normal society’) Vic falls in with the gang of ‘cool girls’ who initially treat Vic badly until she gets in with them. They introduce her to busting out dance moves, glamorous (though slightly too mature for their age) dresses, drug-induced karaoke miming to Rhianna numbers and fistfights with other local girlgangs for their tanktops which get posted on social media for the world, or at least the block, to see (it kind of goes a bit Switchblade Sisters at some points!). But even this gang, who we spent the majority of the film with, start to fall apart. We see that some of them have menial cleaning jobs too, or that there was a previous fourth member of the gang before Vic who left when she got pregnant. One of the other members of the gang who Vic looks up to, Lady, gets beaten and humiliated in one of the girlfights and it falls to Vic to fight to regain the honour not just of Lady but of their gang too. And worst of all, we later find that Lady’s actual name isn’t that appropriate for a no nonsense tough girl! It is all rather disillusioning for Vic and is fascinating but emotionally painful to see her move from wide-eyed hero worship through full acceptance to finally growing past the gang that meant so much to her in her formative years (as well as from compliance to her brother’s threats and the protection of her sisters, to having to abandon them all and escape that family situation), all at the age of 16!
I love the staging of that final shot too, as Vic makes an attempt to contact her younger sister only to walk off when she answers the intercom and then we get the magnificent shot that encapsulates the entire character as, in front of a blurred out backdrop of a twinkling cityscape (there are a lot of beautiful shots of cityscapes in this film, suggesting distant promises of a better life) Vic begins to cry on the right side of frame, moving out of shot as we hear her sob. Then, still focused on that blurred backdrop, Vic walks back into shot, composed and determined before walking off to the left, off into her new life (I'd like to imagine as the eventual crime boss of one of the tougher Paris banlieues! Or at the very least the Nikita for the new millennium!).