Critics reviews

This is a picture I saw more or less cold, at EbertFest, and it just floored me. Not just in its commitment to its characters and its setting, but in its cinematic fluidity.

Bracing in its sly formal mastery and its skillful avoidance of gangland cliches, Celine Sciamma's gorgeous third feature feels all the more vital in the wake of the Paris attacks, even as it refuses to sacrifice specificity on the altar of relatability.

This cookie-cutter title, while great for distribution, does a great disservice to a film that is much more defiant and unsettling than Richard Linklater's subtle meditation on middle-class American suburban boyhood. This is no quietly incremental coming-of-age narrative, but a brash, at times distressing series of snapshots of the life of undereducated black working-class girls on the bottom rung of every social and economic ladder.

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.

Sciamma achieves an almost-impossible feat: eschewing the flat "realism" of the genre, she delves into the mixture of violence, silliness and oneirism of the charmed, yet dangerous, world inhabited by these African princesses fallen to the concrete from an ancient paradise.

There is perhaps no better example of the command of "Diamonds" than Céline Sciamma's use of it in her latest film, Girlhood... And yet I cannot overlook the glaring fact that a white woman directed Girlhood. Why should I be expected to? For women of color who so seldom see our reflection in film, it is imperative that we do not feel indebted to art that merely provides us with a mirror... and that we remain critical of those who are holding up these so-called mirrors.

As in her previous coming-of-age investigations Tomboy and Water Lillies, Sciamma refuses to provide easy answers, making Girlhood both universal (see: title) as well as slyly political. The film confounds superficial expectations of its hood culture milieu throughout its heroine's transition from a meek, braided girl hiding within the banlieues to an itinerant criminal and then something else entirely.

Even if it weren't any good, GIRLHOOD would be worth seeing just because its focus on the intimate lives of black female characters makes it something of an anomaly. Fortunately for movie lovers, the result also shines bright like a diamond in the firmament of contemporary cinema.

Abderrahmane Sissako's "Timbuktu," is a masterwork, and the other, Céline Sciamma's "Girlhood," is fascinating but mediocre. The aesthetic difference between the two movies isn't merely ornamental or academic; it's the difference between an experience and a mechanism, between a world view and a thesis. Sciamma's film moves backward—she knows where her protagonist is meant to end up, and she seems to retrofit the action to bring about the needed results.

It takes an intuitive and devoted filmmaker like Sciamma to go beneath the surface of "girlhood", to remove the normal trappings, and to look at all of the different forces and influences in play. "Girlhood," her latest, is a powerful and entertaining film about a gang of girls, and what friendship means, the protection it provides.

If there's a teenage girl in your life — of any race, whether sister, cousin, daughter, friend, whomever — you would be wise to show her this film. If there's a black teenage girl in your life? You would be mistaken, you would be borderline negligent, not to show her this film. It's rare that I use the word, but Girlhood is an _important_ work of art.

Working for a drug kingpin in a nearby cité, Vic assumes a butch persona with bound breasts, then dons a high-femme ruby minidress and blond wig when making deliveries. Both times that I've seen Girlhood, this has struck me as one reincarnation too many, at odds with Sciamma's otherwise at once loose and assured approach. These doubts dissolve, however, with the perfect, simple choreography of the final shot—when exiting the frame becomes the most radical instance of "doing what you want.