Its French title translates as “Band of Girls”, but Girlhood (Studiocanal, 15) was an opportunistic choice of English-language title for Céline Sciamma’s radiant ode to growing up young, female and black in the stifled suburbs of Paris. As a coming-of-age study, it doesn’t resemble Richard Linklater’s Boyhood in form, focus or film-making texture, though there’s something comparably exacting and expansive about Sciamma’s brand of humanism – it’s a film that locates universal experience even within its highly specific, vividly drawn social context.
Yet for 16-year-old Marieme (Karidja Touré in a blazing screen debut), the adolescent struggle to fit in is amplified by her less-transient status on the fringes – even as she gains self-possession, the everyday discrimination she encounters by dint of her race and gender chips away at her opportunities. She falls in with a gang of delinquent girls who crucially foster her sense of fight even as they pull her away from brighter pathways; it’s for the viewer to determine what she has lost and what she has gained from their fierce, bristly camaraderie. At their most united, however, these girls – and the film they carry – are incandescent, indomitable: in one extraordinary sequence, Sciamma stages a group singalong to Rihanna’s shimmery hit Diamonds as both a tender bonding ritual and a raging rebel yell.
There’s nothing half so thrilling in Furious 7 (Universal, 12), even if the latest instalment in the seemingly inexhaustible petrol and pectorals franchise fashions itself rather strenuously as a celebration of self-styled family. The sad death of Paul Walker has, inevitably, had a sentimentalising effect on the usual lunk-headed proceedings: prepare for some earnest, homily-strewn bonding amid the vehicular wreckage. It might be reasonable for producers to assume that, after 14 years and 11-odd hours of this odd cultural institution, we’re actually invested in Vin Diesel’s speed-freak troupe at a human level; I’m not sure I am, though the multicultural evolution of its ensemble has been heartening to witness. As for the on-road action, it’s as grandly, crunchily ludicrous as ever, though the series’ creative and choreographic peak remains Fast Five.
Sticking with the theme of peculiar families, the Windsors are given a sitcom-style veneer of just-like-us approachability in A Royal Night Out (Lionsgate, 12) – a largely fictional romp that plays as a slab of official palace history as rewritten by Enid Blyton. That may sound ghastly, yet Julian Jarrold’s film has cheerily naff charm in spades. Following the young princesses Elizabeth and Margaret as they shed their regal cocoon, joining the great unwashed for the VE Day celebrations, it’s speculative history jauntily dressed as a cut-glass entry in the one-wild-night teen subgenre.
Now that his Daily Show run is over, Jon Stewart has a little more time on his hands – so perhaps Rosewater (The Works, 15), his first venture into film directing, is a taste of things to come. On this evidence, that’s not the most exciting prospect, but it’s not a dismaying one either. A meat-and-potatoes account of journalist Maziar Bahari’s brutal four-month detention by Iranian authorities, it amply displays Stewart’s political perspicacity, but his swift renegade wit has largely been left in the TV studio. Still, it’s solidly nutritious fare; Stewart could loosen up with practice.
The damply premature demise of the English summer has led to the discovery of the Sky box sets library in my household: as a frequent late arrival to buzz-heavy series, it’s been a rather convenient place to catch up at leisure. Some of the homework has been dutiful: I felt trivially obliged to complete True Blood’s uneven seven seasons, for example. But there have been happy belated discoveries, too. Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells’s self-reflexive sitcom Doll and Em is a total delight, fusing gentle but spry showbiz satire with generous, bittersweet commentary on the push-pull nature of an adult friendship – one where girlhood is kind of an ongoing process.
