A MeToo delight: Schoolgirls

It’s a pleasure to see a new figure taking a leading position in the field of cinema. Especially if she wins a prize or three doing it. And it’s especially satisfying if, as you’ll have spotted from that pronoun, she’s a woman in what is still very much a man’s world.

From the poster for Niñas or Schoolgirls
Andrea Fandos, as Celia, is fourth from left

Pilar Palomero has just burst onto the Spanish film scene, at 40, with her captivating film Niñas or Schoolgirls. It really was quite an explosion. The Goya prizes are the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars, and her film took four, three of them with her as the main recipient: best film, best screenplay (by her) and best new director. It also took best cinematography.

The film deserves all those prizes.

I had no idea what to expect when we started watching it. I knew it was about an eleven-year old girl, Celia, at a convent school in the city of Zaragoza, in 1992. A new girl joins her class and, almost as though the event was a catalyst, Celia moves from childhood to adolescence over the next few weeks.

What I discovered is that little happens in the film, physically. But a hell of a lot emotionally. That’s its power and its strangely appealing charm. 

We see girls dealing with the oddities of relations with their schoolmates, including at one point an appalling example of the kind of vicious bullying children often inflict on each other – again, not physical but emotional, and no less devastating for that.

We see the stilted atmosphere of a Catholic convent school for girls, not presented as brutal and shamefully retrograde, but as rough and ready, well meaning but poorly administered, staffed by teachers who are well-intentioned but less than breathtakingly effective.

We see children on the edge of adolescence, which opens the way to dangerous but exciting new experiences, involving alcohol, tobacco, even sex, all to be tested or at least toyed with.

Above all, and this is the genius of the film, we see a child’s eye view of a confusing and incomprehensible adult world, which Celia tries to explore, finding many questions but few answers, and increasingly suspicious that she is being lied to by the person who matters most to her in the world. That’s her mother, who seems to be hiding far more than she reveals – to be honest, she reveals almost nothing. One of the most telling moments comes when her mother tells Celia that she’s no longer a little girl, and that she has both questions and doubts – and then cuts short the conversation without having resolved, or even addressed, any of them.

There are some male characters in the film – a group of boys, a priest, for instance – but they barely impinge. It’s essentially a film full of women, the vast majority of them young girls. A film about women, by women. And yet a film that speaks to us all, since it deals with problems of the passage to adolescence we all have to face. 

There’s an outstanding performance by the twelve-year old Andrea Fandos as the eleven-year old Celia. And there’s tight, insightful, economical direction without a scene of even a minute too many, by Pilar Palomero, from her own impressive script.

Pilar Palomero, a great new directorial talent

Women making films about women is a great answer to the problems that led to the #metoo movement. Palomero told the newspaper El País:

Mine was a late vocation. I’ve liked films and writing stories since I was a girl, but I was 24 when I started at the Madrid film school. I didn’t expect to be a director. That was something that in my generation we hardly thought about.

Well, it was the fact that the industry was so male dominated that led to the squalid events that made #metoo necessary. Other industries are little better, and many are as bad or worse. But if people like Palomero can break in, and break in so well, to this particular closed world, we’ll be on the way to finding a solution.

The film has a certain quality about it that said to me ‘autobiographical’. So I looked up Palomero’s biography. Born in 1980 in Zaragoza, she would indeed have been about the age of Celia at the time the film is set. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter, whether the film’s events actually happened in Palomero’s life, but it’s clear that part of its power is that it speaks directly, and therefore compellingly, to us of what she knows from having been there herself. 

An excellent investment of a couple of hours of your time, if you ever feel inclined to try it out.