The Geometry of Almost-Touch

A silence which settles over a room when someone enters at exactly the wrong moment. Not dramatic silence. The other kind: when you were just beginning to feel like yourself, alone, and now you have to rearrange your face. It is the silence of being caught mid-thought, mid-dance, mid-becoming. Shuchi Talati's Girls Will Be Girls understands this silence intimately.

Set in an elite boarding school in 1990s northern India, the film follows Mira, a sixteen-year-old who has just been named the school's first female head prefect. "Some teachers thought a girl wasn't up to it," a veteran teacher notes with weary familiarity. But Talati is less interested in institutional triumph than in what happens when Mira falls for Sri, a new student with tousled hair and a smile that looks perhaps a little too practiced. Or maybe I am being unfair to him. Teenage boys are often accused of calculation when they are simply nervous.

Preeti Panigrahi plays Mira with extraordinary restraint, conveying worlds through a lifted chin or a look held half a second too long. She captures the particular intensity of first love: that strange project of trying to become someone worth being loved by while also figuring out what you actually want. The film watches her research intimacy like homework, practicing kisses on her own arm, approaching her body with the same methodical focus she brings to her studies. Funny and tender and completely without condescension.

What complicates everything is Mira's mother, Anila. Kani Kusruti gives a performance that keeps slipping out of your grasp just when you think you understand her. Anila sees in Sri an opportunity to bond with her daughter, to dance together in the living room as they perhaps once did when Mira was small. But there is something else flickering beneath the surface. Competition? Nostalgia for her own unlived girlhood? The film refuses to clarify. This is both its greatest strength and, occasionally, a source of mild frustration. I wanted more of Anila's interiority, even as I recognize that the withholding is precisely the point.

Talati's direction has a quality I can only call tonal precision. She knows exactly how long to hold a shot of two hands almost touching on a bulletin board, how to let a scene breathe without letting it go slack. The film moves at the pace of actual adolescence. Interminably slow when you are waiting for something to happen. Then suddenly, terrifyingly fast. Like standing on a platform at Nørreport watching the minutes tick by, and then the train arrives and departs before you have decided whether to board.

What stays with me is not the plot, which follows familiar coming-of-age contours. It is how certain glances between people feel like entire conversations, and how the people we love most can also be the ones whose attention feels most suffocating. There is a scene near the end where mother and daughter sit together, and the space between them feels both impossibly wide and small enough to cross with a single word.

Neither speaks. The film knows better than to resolve what cannot be resolved.