Day 13. Bande de Filles (2014)

Bande De Filles

English Title

     Girlhood

Year

     2014

Céline’s Role

     Screenwriter & Director

Form

     Feature film (1 h 52mins)

Synopsis

     Oppressed by her family setting, dead-end school prospects and the boys’ law of the neighborhood, Marieme starts a new life after meeting a group of three free-spirited girls. She changes her name, her dress code, and quits school to be accepted into the gang, hoping that this will be a way to freedom.

Trailer

https://youtu.be/mPY8xXl6L10

Available at

https://play.google.com/store/movies/details/Girlhood?id=wHLdiL7An2I

Editor

     Julien Lacheray

Music composer

     Para One (Jean-Baptiste de Laubier)

Director of Photography

     Crystel Fournier

Casting

     Christel Baras

Executive Producer

     Bénédicte Couvreur

Honours/Awards (only some of them!)

• Opening film Directors’ Fortnight, Cannes Film Festival 2014
• Kermode Award for Best Director
• Stockholm International Film Festival—Best Film
• Lumières Awards – Special Jury Prize
• Nominated – César Award for Best Director
• Nominated – European Parliament Lux Prize
• Nominated – Lumières Award for Best Film
• Nominated – Lumières Award for Best Director

Excerpts from reviews

96% Rotten Tomatoes

“Electrifying portrait of a French girl in the hood

Much has been made of the director’s declaration that “French young women today are this girl”, and debates still rage about whether the film’s cinematic aesthetic somehow “exoticises” its subjects (it doesn’t). Yet watching Girlhood, you never get the sense that it is being driven by any sociopolitical objective. On the contrary, what comes through most is the sheer affection for these characters, a bittersweet admiration of their strengths and complexities, an absence of moralising about their lifestyles (rare in films dealing with teen gangs), a celebration of their interpersonal diversity. The result is honest, empowering and electrifying. Bravo!”

The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/may/10/girlhood-gritty-teen-life-review-mark-kermode

 

“Céline Sciamma’s banlieu story makes thrillingly palpable the liberating potential of girl power – and shows us the social pressures that aim to extinguish it.

One of Sight & Sound’s best films of 2015.”

Sight & Sound (BFI film magazine)

https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews-recommendations/film-week-girlhood

 

“It’s not so much a coming-of-age drama, more a protracted and explosively painful identity crisis, riffing on the themes of sexuality and solidarity that Sciamma had explored in previous dramas such as Tomboy (2011) and Water Lilies (2007).

Those struck me as acoustic movies. Now Sciamma lets rip with some stadium-level power chords.”

The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/may/07/girlhood-review-celine-sciamma-karidja-toure

“A masterpiece scene comes halfway through, so powerful in its representation of shared joy and freedom that it sets off echoes around it that continue throughout the rest of the film. The girls have shop-lifted pretty dresses, and booked a hotel room where they can hang out for the night, maybe go out to a club later in their stolen goods. There's a sense of exhilaration in the moment, and the four get up and start dancing together to Rihanna’s “Diamonds.” The light is a deep blue, and the girls are jumping and laughing and loving each other's awesomeness for almost the entirety of the song. All four are in the frame at the same time. Sciamma has given us what feels like a real event, a real moment, one of those precious moments in time that the girls might look back on and think, "That. That was good."”

RobertEbert.Com
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/girlhood-2015

“…Bande de filles , the third feature film, angry and scintillating, by Céline Sciamma. She makes it original, which thoroughly cleanses the fabric of the learning story by injecting it with a transgender feminist subtext, and the lyricism of a fiery ode to today's youth. Coming back from the Tomboy war, who had unleashed the wrath of the far right in 2013, the filmmaker draws the genre towards war films, war of all against all, and on all fronts - school, family, the street -, and offers these four young black girls, represented in reverse clichés in which their fellows are generally locked, a status of generational icons.”

Le Monde
https://www.lemonde.fr/cinema/article/2014/10/21/bande-de-filles-amazones-franches_4509430_3476.html
(translated by Google)

 

“Sciamma has redefined teenage female friendship in fierce, funny, uncompromising ways, allowing the strained bravado and ritualized aggression to coexist with tender moments of support and compassion. “Girlhood” is a mesmerizing exercise in the enlightenment that can happen when a filmmaker shifts the male cinematic gaze ever so slightly and uncovers what looks like a whole new world.”

Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/girlhood-depicts-the-competition-and-solidarity-of-teenaged-friendship/2015/02/26/a3577f94-bd20-11e4-bdfa-b8e8f594e6ee_story.html

Comments

This is Céline Sciamma’s third feature film as writer and director, and she teams up again with La Fémis buddies Julien Lacheray (editor) and Jean-Baptiste de Laubier (music, as Para One). Also stalwarts on her film team are Executive Producer Benedicte Couvreur, casting director Christel Baras, and press attaché François Hassan Guerrar.

Director of photography for Bande de Filles is Crystel Fournier. Crystel was also DP for the two previous films for which Céline was writer and director (Naissance de Pieuvres and Tomboy), but it is the last of Céline’s films (so far) that Crystel has been DP for.

 

Like Tomboy and Naissance de Pieuvres, much scholarly work has been written about this film. As I am neither a film scholar nor a feminist scholar, I will leave it to the professionals for their analysis of this film.

Should you wish to read what the scholars have to say about this film check out these articles.