BY MIRIAM RINN

NEWJERSEY NEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

French director/writer Céline Sciamma is interested in how girls form their identities. In her previous film, the luminous “Tomboy,” she examined a young girl’s determination to pass as a boy. The child of a loving bourgeois family in a small town, the girl was able to try out her new role in safety. In Sciamma’s latest film, the potent “Girlhood,” the central character is a teenager, black and poor, who lives in one of Paris’s outer ring housing projects. While she is certain of her sexuality, she is unsure what being a woman means in her male-dominated home and neighborhood.

Using an unprofessional cast, Sciamma introduces us to a group of teenage girls who might make you change your seat if you encountered them in the subway. Loud and boisterous, the girls dance on the train to Paris and shoplift once they get there. Eager to pick fights with other girls and hypersensitive to any snub, the girls become quiet and meek around boys. Seemingly of North African heritage, the girls may dress provocatively but they are strangely subdued around the boys in their neighborhood. The rules of the old country still apply, it seems, and the girls are a world apart from their sexually liberated white peers.

We first meet shy Marieme (Karidja Touré) on her school’s girls’ soccer team, where all the players are black. The next time we see her at school she is having an anguished conversation with her guidance counselor. Her grades are too low for her to go on to the next academic level and the counselor encourages her to go to vocational school. Seeing this as a dead end, Marieme angrily leaves and soon falls in with three tough-looking girls. (The film’s French title is “Gang of Girls.”) Changing her name to Vic and her hairstyle from cornrows to a straight weave, she begins to skip school and take on the habits of the others. She shakes down timid white students for money so the girls can get enough to party in a hotel room. Dressed up in stolen clothes, they giggle a lot and get drunk, but they don’t invite men over or go out to meet them. Instead, they dance together to Rihanna’s “Diamonds,” playing out a teen fantasy.

In addition to Vic’s developing friendship with the other girls, she is becoming more rebellious at home. Her mother is a cleaner and rarely home, leaving Vic’s bullying older brother in charge. Responsible for her younger sister, Vic is also tentatively flirting with one of her brother’s friends. She initiates their intimacy, but when her brother finds out and beats her viciously, she runs away. At each decision point, the screen fades to black, and in the next scene, Vic looks different to emphasize the change.

Sciamma doesn’t excuse the poor choices Vic makes--and there are many--but she presents the girl as heroic. Unlike the others in the gang, Vic is determined to make her own way. Just as she refuses the school counselor’s advice to learn a trade, she also turns down her boyfriend’s offer of marriage. You’ll be a decent girl again, he tells her, once we marry. Vic doesn’t want to be a wife and mother, though, if that means that she is saddled with the expectations and obligations others have for her.

Instead, she runs off to do drug deliveries for a local dealer. Here she comes into contact with the wealthy white French men and women she’s had no connection with before, and to whom she is basically invisible. Vic looks like a hooker when she makes her deliveries, but she dresses like a boy when she hangs out with the drug crew. Is she trying to protect herself from sexual advances? Is she trying to look tougher than she is? Her boyfriend doesn’t understand when he comes to visit and is horrified that she is binding her breasts.

The other three girls in the gang have strikingly individual personalities and looks, but Toure dominates the screen. Her extraordinarily expressive face can look childish or seductive, gentle or vicious. With the other girls, she finds love and understanding and acceptance, but there is betrayal too. Courage and determination are required to make a life, and Vic has enough of both. Now she needs a little luck.