The Girls review – poignant coming-of-age romance is an understated gem of Sri Lankan cinema

Sumitra Peries’ 1978 film about teenage sisters and thwarted romance is laden with passions that can’t be spoken aloud Here is a gem of South Asian cinema from 1978, by the Sri Lankan director and editor Sumitra Peries. With its lucid monochrome cinematography and calm, natural, unselfconscious performances, there is a freshness and warmth to this film. It is often on the brink of melodrama or soap opera, many shots having a tendency to slow zoom into the actors’ faces, and yet The Girls is in fact rather understated. A great deal of its poignancy resides in this very suppression of emotion. We are in a world of passions that can’t be spoken aloud. It is a story through whose entire running time I wistfully hoped for a happy ending, but that is what Peries ruthlessly withholds from her audience. Kusum (Vasanthi Chathurani) is a studious, serious teen from a poor family with a scholarship to a very good school. Her father is seriously ill and her mother works hard to make ends meet. She...

Jeremy Pope: ‘An Oscar changes where the comma goes in your cheque’

The Pose star, who plays a gay marine in the military drama The Inspection, discusses Black masculinity, quitting a studio film over his sexuality – and his bodybuilding pastor father

No one – other than Kaa the snake from The Jungle Book – has eyes like Jeremy Pope. Watch the 30-year-old actor in The Inspection, in which he plays a young gay marine, or in the glittery TV series Hollywood or Pose, both co-created by Ryan Murphy (who recently called Pope “the future”), and it’s hard to deny the hypnotic power of his peepers.

They stay hidden for most of our video call today: he keeps his phone flat on the desk in front of him, with the camera pointing upwards, providing an intimate view of his nostrils. At least his mellifluous voice is music to the ears, even if he does have a habit of referring to himself in the third person.

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