Girls of the Sun follows a French journalist who is embedded with a battalion of Iraqi Kurdish women. These soldiers were tortured and raped as ISIS captives. ISIS Bahar, played by Golshifteh Farahani, leads them. While it is not an earth-shattering movie, it is unique. I’m not a fan of war movies, but it is unlikely that many of them realistically focus on women fighting in war.
If women are fighting in movies, it is usually in a sci-fi, horror and action context, highly stylized and unrealistic complete with tight, flattering outfits, acrobatics and/or powers. I love to get my women kicking butt vitamins wherever I can get it so I am a faithful adherent to those movies, but I’ll never forget that the first time that I saw Princess Leia brandishing a laser gun and rescuing her damn self, the other guys in the dorm room said, “That’s not realistic,” when it was definitely more realistic than being in space and on your first day as a fighter pilot, you hit a one in a million shot. Sure. There is such a proliferation of stylized images of fighting women is because it is fun, a fantasy both sexes can enjoy and ultimately not threatening in the real world.
If I had a daughter, the first thing that I would do is to make her comfortable her using physical force if necessary. Images of fighting men, ordinary men rising to the occasion to fight against literal bullies or ideological bullies in war are so ordinary and considered realistic that it is never questioned. Since the dawn of movies, including Birth of a Nation, men have been the focus of such movies, and many of the movies that we now look at retroactively as cliché or cheesy were considered classics at the time. We’ve given war movies centering men over a hundred years to grow, and we still grade the crap ones, especially if it is based on history, on a curve lest there be a misunderstanding that we don’t value the ideological and historical background of the movie.
I was shocked after reading reviews of Girls of the Sun to find it graded so harshly. If I were a younger person, I would compare the reviewers’ other war movie reviews and see if they graded the male counterparts as severely. My main criticism of the film is that the journalist should have never been in the movie. I understand that it may have been a financial decision to include the journalist so the movie could get French funding. It does explain the opening and closing scenes, but it is also a device that Americans are used to. Filmmakers often cynically center a white protagonist because there is lack of confidence that audiences will empathize with a person of color even though the story is about a person of color.
It also does not help that the chosen white protagonist of Girls of the Sun is modeled on a person that already was the subject of a movie. Marie Colvin, whom Rosamund Pike brilliantly played in A Private War, was the model for the French journalist in Girls of the Sun. I have no idea if the filmmakers even knew of the development of that movie. As Stephen King wrote, we all drink from the same pool, but it was bad luck because not only does this depiction pale in comparison to Pike’s, but it is a more conventional, safe image of Colvin so that she parallels Bahar’s situation: widowed by war and separated from her child. Thanks, I only needed one Bahar. The real Colvin was twice divorced and childless. A woman does not have to be defined by her relationship to other people to be relatable. I’m sure that a widowed warrior does not need a journalist to perfectly mirror her in order to relate to her. Let’s lift up women by stereotyping them. Yippee!
If I excise the journalist from the film, Girls of the Sun is actually a decent film that could still use improvement, but is quite stirring as it is. When we think of invasions, we don’t think of the occupied as modern people. The Rape of Nanking and Soviet invasion of Berlin that led to the massive rape of German women, including occasionally German Jewish survivors, is seen as something remote, isolated and not modern. We have to remember that at that time, they felt similarly to us and were going about their normal lives more or less before the war arrives at their doorstep, dehumanizes them as individuals and makes them an object for the victor to enjoy, not a person. Girls of the Sun, which is not a great title, introduces the viewer to Bahar on the battlefield then toggles to the past before the war started until just before the past intersects with the present. This narrative structure works because it makes the past violations so much more galling knowing who she will become, which is not necessarily how anyone, men or women, would react after such a traumatic incident. Actual rape is not depicted, but heavily implied.
Girls of the Sun only depicts her as a soldier and a family woman-a wife and mother. With less time devoted to the journalist, I would have liked to see more of what Bahar’s normal daily life was like as a lawyer. A lawyer is as close as civilian women get to bearing arms and fighting, and the movie misses an opportunity to show Bahar’s life as a spectrum. It also does not show how she gets trained to become a soldier. I raise these points because I’m genuinely interested and see the connections, not because I question the transition from civilian to commander. Farahani’s performance is amazing, and I can imagine her as an icon of the clear-eyed, focus woman as general, founder of a nation, without any modern examples for her to rely on. She has to forge the standard of what a fighting, leading woman looks like, and she wisely does not just do what a man would do.
Bahar is tired, but eager, frustrated with her male counterparts, but instinctually knows just where to stop the edge of her tongue from piercing and deflating their egos to get them to listen to her, gentle with the girls and women that she leads, but withdrawn and separate because of the past and her hopes for the future. In many ways, Girls of the Sun is a rape revenge movie, but without the exploitative elements. I’m not going to lie. I would have loved more moments like the one featured in the trailer, “He’s dead. No, he’s in front of me, stone cold dead and killed by a woman. Care to join him?” I get that it isn’t necessarily realistic (though I want it to be), especially for a historically inspired war drama, but I’m an American.
I loved how Girls of the Sun showed how women camped out visually looks similar and different to images of men at war. The other women don’t get much of a story line, which was a valid complaint especially since extraneous journalist gets more screen time, but if only Bahar had the focus, I would not have minded. I do think that the fight scenes had a couple of the women do unnecessarily dumb things to alert us to impending danger.
Girls of the Sun is a solid movie, but it needs work. I think that if you’re interested in women kicking butt in a realistic way, it is must see viewing. I don’t think that the general panning is warranted. I’ve seen worse films treated like masterpieces. This movie is trying to do something innovative, and it mostly succeeds. Unfortunately no one else agrees, and it got pulled after its first week in theaters.