Girl Power: Céline Sciamma on Girlhood

Consider the coming-of-age movie for a second. Cast your mind through cinema's history and what titles flash before your eyes? Chances are there’ll be a fair few US films, names like Rebel Without a Cause, American Graffiti, Breaking Away and Rushmore. But practically every filmmaking nation has a classic film of teen turmoil, from Mexico (Y Tu Mamá También) to Australia (The Year My Voice Broke) via Senegal (Touki Bouki) to here in the UK (Gregory's Girl, Kes, Bronco Bullfrog).

What’s lacking from the above list? To put it bluntly: women. Female stories are limited in all corners of film culture, but they’re particularly outnumbered in the coming-of-age genre. Praise be, then, for French filmmaker Céline Sciamma, who seems to be on a one-woman mission to redress the balance. Her 2006 debut, Water Lilies, was concerned with the sexual awakening of a group of teenage girls in a synchronised swimming team. In the follow up, 2001's Tomboy, Sciamma considered the body and identity issues of an androgynous ten-year-old, who reinvents herself as a roughhousing schoolboy after moving to a new town with her family. Her latest, Girlhood, centres on 16-year-old misfit Marieme (Karidja Touré), a shy black girl from a poor Paris suburb who comes out of her shell when she’s initiated into the mini-sisterhood of three streetwise firecrackers, who like fighting as much as they like dressing up and dancing to Rihanna.

Director Sciamma’s inspiration came from observing similar female cliques as she walked around her hometown. “I would pass by these groups of girls on the streets of Paris. They had this great energy and charisma, with style, and a solidarity,” she says. “I really wanted to look at them – that’s a good starting point for a movie, when you want so badly to look at someone.” She realised the irony, though, that in her profession these girl gangs were never looked at. “Black girls in French cinema are totally invisible, they don’t exist. I figured OK, I have the intimate urge to look at them and there’s also a collective urge to do so, so I decided to go for it.”

Go for it she does. Like the girls at the heart of the story, the film is bold and brawling. It opens with a clashing of bodies as Marieme kicks ass on the field playing American football, and these clashes continue throughout – with rival girl gangs, her controlling older brother and the other men on the estate who want their women to be obedient, demure. “In France we’ve been told for six to seven years now [in the media] that girls are getting violent, and I wondered if this was true or not.” She did some research and found it to be moonshine. “There have always been violent women, we just don’t talk about it. We don’t want women to know about their history of violence because it would be a story of their struggle. We don’t talk about the women who fought in the French Revolution and took the Bastille – we don’t because they are strong figures and they would inspire women to be activists.”

In the world of cinema, violence tends to be the catalyst for a character's downward spiral. Sciamma’s film doesn’t conform to this trope. “Some violence is necessary, some violence is fulfilling, and some anger is legitimate,” she says forcefully. “I really wanted to show violence, not to stigmatise those girls but to empower them and show this violence should be looked at for what it is: they are rebelling, they are hitting back, because society certainly hits you.”

“Black girls in French cinema are totally invisible, they don’t exist” – Céline Sciamma

Girlhood is littered with these stirring images of feminine power, but the film is at its most potent when it focuses on the intensity of teenage female friendships. Sciamma puts this quality down to the alchemy of the casting. “We had to pick strong individuals but also we had to find the right group, so we picked four girls who already had some chemistry, and then we really workshopped for two weeks before shooting.” Sciamma reveals that she was also part of this group. “We would play games, we would sing and dance, we would just create some past between us, memories for that group. It was about getting to know each other, and also initiating the girls to the rules of the cinema – that is, to show them that it’s all about the present, that you have to evoke the right emotion, the right attitude for each scene.” The director stopped short of living at the house the girls shared during production, however. “A crazy house,” she laughs, “I couldn’t live there.”  

Sciamma’s aesthetic seems in tune with her protagonists: like the girls on screen, her visuals pop. It’s a style that’s pleasingly at odds with the traditional depiction of poor neighbourhoods in art-house cinema. “I wanted to make it very colourful in the beginning, with some style, some grammar, and not go to any cliched idea of how you should film the suburbs. Who has the right to mise-en-scène, you know?” Indeed: Girlhood’s shots are strikingly composed; colour threads through the film. “It’s about refusing the supposed frontier between the art film, which is delicate, subtle and looks at real life, which is supposed to be modest in its form,” explains Sciamma, “and the entertainment movie, which has spectacle and music and sound and vivid images. For me it’s about bringing all the tools of cinema together.”

While her two previous films were well received, Girlhood's added racial dimension is likely to bring it to a wider audience. “It’s the first time that a film with an all-black teen cast was made in France, so it’s gotten quite a bit of attention,” she says. “One movie can’t change it all but it can put the question out there.” Sciamma’s trump card is that she doesn’t stress morality for any of Marieme's choices; by the end of the film her destiny is uncertain but still hopeful. “The fact that life is still ahead of her, that makes the audience kind of responsible for her in a way, and I really wanted it that way... In the end she’s coming into our world. What will become of her? I don’t know. If you’re optimistic you might think she’s going to be OK. If you’re not that optimistic you might be worried. But this world is ours and we can make something happen. That’s basically the message of the movie – let’s look after each other.”

The Skinny at Glasgow Film Festival 2015:

Read our daily updates from the GFF at theskinny.co.uk/cineskinny