Green Girl (Kannada)
In Green Girl, director Sarthak Hegde presents a love story that is both tender and politically charged. Set against the fractured social landscape of coastal Karnataka, the 50-minute featurette follows childhood friends-turned-lovers, Jeevan Acharya (Mayur Gowda) and Ameena (Sucharitha), who share an effortless, unforced, and achingly ordinary bond. Watching them laugh, argue, and dream together is like being drawn into a private world of two friends navigating love, rather than witnessing characters perform.
Much of the featurette, written by Sarthak, along with Triko and Manish Kumar, unfolds inside Jeevan and Ameena’s shared bubble. That he is Hindu and she, a Muslim, doesn’t matter to Ameena. She shrugs it off with a breezy, “It’s 2024. Who cares?”
Their chemistry is effortless, their intimacy, authentic. Their joy lies in the mundane—a cigarette, a popsicle, conversations about wanting to move to America. It is in these details that the film beholds its quiet poetry. These everyday gestures of the protagonists also symbolise tiny acts of rebellion, tokens of a love that shouldn’t need defiance, but does. In coastal Karnataka, where the story is set, communal tensions run high, and even love within religious prescriptions carries the weight of defiance.
The outside world, however, is never far away. The film acknowledges how the protagonists live in a place where conflicts are always threatening to erupt. This urgency is woven into the narrative without overwhelming it, reminding us constantly of how fragile Ameena and Jeevan’s happiness really is.
It is the contrast between the warmth of love and the coldness of the world around that gives Green Girl its cinematic edge.
Jeevan himself is written with contradictions. He is a member of a Hindutva organisation, partly because it helped repair his relationship with his father, and partly because he believes he is doing social service. His uneasy relationship with Prem Anna, a man deeply entrenched in divisive ideology, further complicates his position. The film doesn’t try to smooth out these rough edges, and that honesty gives Jeevan depth.
There is also a striking moment when caste is folded into the discussion. Prem Anna remarks how the privileges of dominant caste Hindus are sustained while other OBC communities serve as the “foot soldiers” of Hindutva organisations. These touches ground the story in a very specific social reality.
That said, some of Jeevan’s choices feel far removed from reality. In one scene, he invites Ameena to a temple fair and introduces her to his peers from his right-wing organisation. Though it fits the fictional plot, the moment feels implausible—could something like that really happen outside fiction?
Where Green Girl falters is in Ameena’s world, or rather, the absence of it. We never see her family, her friendships, or her struggles beyond Jeevan. She feels less like a full person and more like an idea: “liberated, fearless, defiant.” The writing here feels thin, giving Ameena little grounding or context to grow beyond an idea.
The choice to show Ameena in a hijab, casually smoking, encouraging Jeevan to smoke, and engaging in sexual intimacy feels like the film is leaning into provocation without fully considering the context. This is especially striking in coastal Karnataka, a region still carrying the scars of the 2022 anti-hijab protests, when young Muslim women were publicly harassed and barred from classrooms for asserting their rights.
Against that backdrop, reducing Ameena’s “freedom” to cigarettes or sexual acts risks coming across as tone-deaf, simplifying her autonomy into a series of provocative gestures, rather than exploring it with depth and nuance.
The film, hence, misses the chance to imagine her liberation in more layered ways. Ameena becomes a sketch, while the story bends around Jeevan’s contradictions. And that’s disappointing, because the film clearly dares to go deeper, but it just doesn’t do that with her character.
Still, Green Girl is not without courage. It speaks directly to the anxieties of its setting without sugarcoating, and there is something admirable in the way the young, fiery filmmaker confronts his material.
Sometimes, it feels like a radical film made by accident, and some other times, like a liberal love story with a sharp bite. Either way, it leaves you with a lingering ache—the sweetness of Ameena and Jeevan’s love and the bitter reality of a world all too ready to crush it.
Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Neither TNM nor any of its reviewers have any sort of business relationship with the film’s producers or any other members of its cast and crew.