One of the great pleasures of a film festival is encountering a film that takes you completely by surprise. Sad Girlz, which received its UK premiere at the Cambridge Film Festival, is one such discovery. Made by the Mexican filmmaking collective Colmena and directed by Fernanda Tovar in an extraordinarily assured feature debut, this is an exceptionally powerful coming-of-age drama that explores the precarious territory between childhood innocence and the unsettling realities of adulthood.
We are in Mexico, where two inseparable friends, Paula and La Maestra, are sixteen-year-old competitive swimmers hoping to qualify for the Junior Pan American Swimming Championships. They are extraordinarily close, enjoying their young lives with all the giggling, teasing, exuberance and vivacious camaraderie of adolescence. Their world seems full of possibilities. They are, quite literally, swimming towards the future.
Then something goes horribly wrong. At a party, Paula is sexually assaulted by Daniel, a fellow swimmer on whom she has a crush. What begins as an innocent adolescent encounter becomes something altogether darker when he ignores the boundaries of consent. Paula is left drowning in conflicting emotions, uncertain how to understand what has happened to her, let alone what to do about it.
La Maestra, fiercely protective of her friend, is outraged. She wants justice, perhaps even revenge, while Paula struggles with shame, confusion and a sense that something precious has been taken from her. Their different responses threaten the very friendship that has always sustained them. There is guilt everywhere, guilt that cannot easily be expiated, not even with the assistance of La Maestra's amateur experiments with tarot-card mysticism.
Tovar handles all this with remarkable sensitivity. The assault itself is not shown. What matters is its aftermath: the silences, the awkward conversations, the conflicting emotions and the enormous difficulty of finding the right words for an experience that neither girl is equipped to confront. Their world is populated by adults who seem incapable of helping, let alone understanding. The girls are left largely to navigate this bewildering territory themselves.
Water becomes the film's most expressive visual language. Swimming, submerging, struggling for breath, rising towards the surface: these images provide an extraordinarily effective metaphor for the emotional turmoil engulfing both girls. The cinematography by Rosa Hadit Hernández is gorgeous, particularly the many swimming-pool sequences in which light, movement and air bubbles dissolve into swirling patterns of colour and shape. At times, the camera seems almost to suspend us between two worlds, the reassuring familiarity of childhood and the frightening uncertainties of adulthood.
The performances are universally excellent, particularly those of Darana Álvarez as Paula and Rocío Guzmán as La Maestra. Their friendship has a wonderfully spontaneous quality. The laughter, the affectionate physicality, the occasional irritation and the sudden emotional withdrawals all feel entirely natural. This is a film that understands just how intensely sixteen-year-olds experience the world. A compelling but unobtrusive musical score by Wissam Hojeij gently guides us through its changing emotional currents.
Yet for all its disturbing subject matter, Sad Girlz is ultimately a film full of hope. Tovar refuses to define these young women solely through the violence inflicted upon one of them. Their friendship may be tested almost to breaking point, but there is resilience here, along with the possibility of recovery, reconciliation and lives still waiting to be lived.
It is a deeply humane film, compassionate without sentimentality, angry without becoming strident, and visually beautiful without ever allowing its beauty to overwhelm the story. The girls may have been plunged into troubled waters, but Tovar leaves us believing that they can, somehow, find their way back to the surface. A remarkable debut and one of the discoveries of this year's Cambridge Film Festival.