Girlhood

“One of the best coming of age movies in years.”—Indiewire

Marieme is a shy, bored, put-upon teenager living in a disadvantaged banlieue of Paris. Recruited to join a gang by three tougher girls, she sheds some of her inhibitions, restyles her hair, changes her name, and tries to take charge of her own life. Teenage girlhood, with its nervous stretches of boredom and its violent, electric upsurges, has been filmmaker Céline Sciamma’s dominant subject so far. Her previous two films (Water Lilies and Tomboy) were audience favorites at the Wex, and Girlhood has widely been praised as her best to date. She captures these girls’ lives with a rare empathy and a close, attentive eye, and the result is one of the few modern French movies to take a deep interest in the country’s urban working class. (112 mins., DCP)