Pyjama Girls

Don’t expect deprivation tourism. Maya Derrington’s acclaimed, cleverly orchestrated documentary is far too clever for that sort of thing. Shot around Dublin’s Basin Street flats, Pyjama Girls pitches the ubiquitous garments of the title as part of a punk rock aesthetic.

The girls in question, part of a broader class of city-dwelling PJ lovers, are two bright young things named Lauren Dempsey and Tara Salinger. As Ms. Derrington’s arresting film opens, Lauren lives with her grandmother Peggy; her mother has disappeared off the scene years earlier. Heroin, we are informed, was a major factor. Tara, Lauren’s BF and constant companion, appears to live a more settled existence nearby, but like Lauren, she has been getting in trouble at school and elsewhere.

Pyjama Girls never interrogates its teenage subjects but instead hangs out as they do. It’s never quite fly-on-the-wall - these young women are far too canny to allow someone to sneak up on them with a camera – but the girls’ own editorialising does produce some interesting effects.
Much of the film’s power comes from what we don’t see and what they don’t say. Text messages inspire anger though we never learn the offending content. There are enough scraped knuckles, minor injuries and boasts to confirm that these ladies are fully committed to girl-on-girl violence yet no such incidents occur on screen. And we’re never really sure what has happened to Lauren’s mother, though the teen proudly describes how a bullet once went through the front door of their family home.

Regardless of their grim social circumstances, Lauren and Tara are articulate and wise beyond their years. Lauren deftly plays around with language (Ballyfermot is sometimes Ballier and other times, the Ferma), references The Magdalene Sisters and Adam And Paul in conversation and is more than capable of locating pyjama wearing within a grander anarchic scheme. If society doesn’t care about them, she points out, why should they care about society’s rules?

The film’s greatest unspoken tragedy is that this plainly intelligent kid has already been expelled from school. Somebody do something, please...