Preeti Panigrahi is excellent as Mira, a prefect dealing with first love and, unusually, sex, as she navigates the patriarchy in 90s north India <\/p>\n
\u2018Some teachers thought a girl wasn\u2019t up to it,\u201d says a veteran female teacher with a weary roll of the eye. It\u2019s some time in the 1990s, and a posh boarding school in northern India has just appointed a girl as head prefect, its first ever. Her name is Mira (Preeti Panigrahi), and she\u2019s a sensible, academically gifted 16-year-old, known as a bit of a stickler. But Mira\u2019s term as head prefect happens to coincide with first love; she falls for Sri (Kesav Binoy Kiron), a new boy with heavenly tousled hair and what looks like a well-practised sensitive smile.<\/p>\n
So, this is the story of Mira\u2019s teenage sexual awakening \u2013 a tale as old as the Himalayas, which poke into view whenever she leaves the school grounds. But there\u2019s something new here: Mira is a teenage girl who feels plausible and behaves in ways that don\u2019t play out like earlier coming-of-age movies. Take the way she approaches losing her virginity \u2013 like it\u2019s science homework. Methodical Mira does her research, looking up the anatomy in the library, performing experiments at home: French kissing her arm and masturbating to work out what\u2019s what and where. It\u2019s a quiet film, and Panigrahi plays Mira with such poise and intelligence, conveying her innermost thoughts with a slight lift of the chin here or lingering look there.<\/p>\n