Sumitra Peries’s The Girls: how a landmark Sri Lankan film captures the agony of girlhood

The recent 4K restoration of The Girls (Gehenu Lamai, 1978) – the debut work of Sri Lankan director Sumitra Peries, who died in 2023 – was screened at Cannes last May. It has since been screened elsewhere, including Italy, Melbourne and Colombo. The BFI London Film Festival, which opens in October, is featuring it as well.

When it first appeared in London, The Girls moved and mesmerised critics. David Robinson of The Times, for instance, praised it for what he perceived as its “holistic feminine sensibility”. Similar reviews appeared in Germany and Madras (now Chennai) when it received screenings there. There was much praise for its acting, editing, and, in Mannheim, Germany, its “aura of pessimism” and “unobtrusive photography.”

By the time of its release in 1978, Sumitra and her husband Lester James Peries had been firmly established as leading figures of the Sri Lankan cinema: Lester as a director, and Sumitra as an editor, easily the most sought-after in the country.

After working more than a decade for other directors, Sumitra ventured into filmmaking in her own right. The Girls, which she and Lester produced, broke ground by delving into a world and an experience which Sri Lankan, and South Asian, filmmakers had not properly explored before. In that sense it proved to be unique: a film about the agony and torment of being a woman in South Asia, directed by a South Asian woman, and pervaded, as Robinson saw it, by a “feminine sensibility”.

The plot of The Girls is, at one level, deceptively simple. Based on a sentimental but popular novel by the Sri Lankan writer Karunasena Jayalath, it tells the story of an innocent and sensitive schoolgirl called Kusum (Vasanthi Chathurani), who plans to enter university. Kusum and her sister Soma (Jenita Samaraweera) are living with their parents; their mother Jenny (Trilicia Gunawardena) struggles hard to pay for their education.

Then, one day, Kusum’s rich cousin Nimal Hathurusinghe (Ajith Jinadasa) falls in love with her. He proposes to her, but Kusum hesitates and rejects him; she is afraid of breaking the trust of Nimal’s overbearing mother (Chitra Wakishta). However, almost against her will, she finds her affection for him growing, and slowly discovers some freedom in romance. When the affair is discovered not long after, she faces the consequences. Meanwhile, the more ambitious Soma, who dreams of a glamorous life as an actress, wins a beauty contest and begins an affair with a film director. This too leads to a dead-end.

Because of Sumitra’s direction, and the novel – Jayalath was well known for his sympathetic views on women – The Girls is filled with empathy for its young, sensitive protagonist. From the opening, where Kusum, who has fallen on hard times, comes across Nimal, who has by now been appointed as a Divisional Revenue Officer (DRO), the film explores the links and contradictions between class and gender.

In one otherwise minor scene, for instance, a radicalised student goes on a diatribe against capitalism. He invites Kusum and another classmate, Padmini (Shyama Ananda), to join the debate. Kusum casually smiles and replies: “Unlike you boys, we cannot spend late hours in the classroom.” In a more climactic sequence, Nimal faults her for arguing with a rich and snobbish girl. Fighting back tears, Kusum declares: “But I also have a heart like other people. I am also not used to being humiliated, like other people. Please let me be. Please.” The latter scene, which ends with Kusum running away from Nimal and collapsing and sobbing inconsolably by a tree, is the most powerful in the film.

Such scenes show that, though rooted in a sentimental teenage romance, The Girls questioned gender and class as few Sri Lankan films had done until then. Vilasnee Tampoe-Hautin comments in her biography of Sumitra Peries that the locus of the film is “the grey area where tradition and progress meet”. The overarching theme is that tradition stifles femininity. Sumitra touches on this by depicting how different the two sisters are, yet how similar their fates become. Kusum is traditionalist and deferential; Soma is rebellious and ambitious. But at the end, both lose out. As one contemporary review put it, “virtue does not always lead to success”. Neither, it would seem, does defiance.

Ultimately, The Girls works on multiple levels. It is at once an indictment of patriarchy and tradition, an easily relatable love story, and a window to a world few filmmakers in Sri Lanka, or South Asia, have been able to enter with as much grace since. As Mark Cousins observed for me some time back, “she probes shyness and tentative love” throughout. The last word should, in that sense, be Sumitra’s. When I interviewed her in 2016, she called it “a very personal film – perhaps the most personal I have done.”

The Girls screens at the 69th BFI London Film Festival.