Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Déborah Lukumuena, Le’Shantey Bonsu, Liana Turner
Intro:
… a rich, moving and complex story of love and hope; the film merely lacks the depth to properly convey it.
Déborah Lukumuena, who plays Grace in Girl, has a remarkable talent for simultaneously expressing and concealing emotion. At various points throughout the film, her character suffers from panic attacks, softly counting numbers aloud in an effort to cope. In these moments, Lukumuena lets Grace’s suffering bubble over even whilst supressing the depths of her terrible anguish.
Written and directed by Adura Onashile, Girl follows Grace, a West African migrant who gave birth to her daughter Ama (Le’Shantey Bonsu) when she was just fourteen years old, before moving to Glasgow to work as a cleaner. Internally decimated by her traumatic, unspoken past, Grace obsessively attempts to protect eleven-year-old Ama from the fate she suffered.
Grace transforms her dark, shadowy apartment into a hermetically sealed bubble surrounding herself and Ama that is both protective and suffocating. As Ama enters into puberty, Grace keeps her ignorant of the realities of the female body, so as to shelter her from the knowledge that such a body could be violated and wounded. Yet, in doing so, Grace also denies Ama any agency over herself, leaving the girl humiliated when she first menstruates and emits body odour. Grace, too, is trapped in a prison that was constructed by someone else, making her disconcerting treatment of Ama both understandable and unlikeable. Equal parts caring and cruel, Lukumuena deftly embodies a woman torn asunder by contradictions.
Ama soon befriends her neighbour Fiona (played by Liana Turner) and the girls dance and sing together, revelling in their freedom to move and sway. Fiona shows Ama how to apply glittery makeup and later guides her through her first period, teaching Ama how to take control over her own body. The beatific play of coloured light on Ama’s face during both these scenes suggests they are moments of enlightenment for the young protagonist, though such glimmers of joy are not enough to rescue her from the darkness that always threatens to engulf her. In its wonderous use of light, Girl often evokes Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight and the magnificent beams of magenta that suffuse little Chiron in that film.
While there is much to admire about Onashile’s film, it suffers from an incredibly sparse script and a lack of backstory. Grace attempts to completely shut out the world and in the process, successfully keeps the audience at a great remove. As a result, we never learn enough about Grace or Ama via dialogue or flashback to perceive them as whole, three-dimensional characters. This is a shame because, from what we do learn of the pair, theirs is a rich, moving and complex story of love and hope; the film merely lacks the depth to properly convey it.
