Bad Girl triggered controversy even before its release. Centred around the inner worlds of love and sex, featuring a young Brahmin woman as the protagonist, the film raised right-wing hackles.
Debutant director Varsha Bharath sets out to tell a coming-of-age story that she also describes as a fun chick flick. We’re introduced to Ramya (Anjali Sivaraman) during her student days in a school that identifies itself as a ‘gurukulam’. Her orthodox family is solely concerned with maanam (honour) and caste endogamy in the face of an adolescent’s natural curiosities about desire.
We remain with Ramya from her schoolgirl crushes to the crises of a single woman in her early thirties.
Ultimately, it is a young woman’s quest to find home and belonging, even if it’s just her and her cats—somewhere she can be herself without the clutter of patriarchal demands.
Much of this is a near universal experience for women. Whether it’s from romance, found families, with our pets and plants, there is a soul-deep ache to build sanctuary for ourselves.
This sanctuary is elusive, too often unattainable for many women. Birth families, conservative landlords who police food and deny housing to unmarried people, and the ever-antagonistic judgement of neighbours are the formidable barriers that women are forced to overcome.
Bad Girl exposes what haunts such a single woman who makes her own choices. The film also touches on the toxicity young girls and women end up normalising in relationships and the long, hard road to unlearning broken ideas of love.
Amit Trivedi’s lilting ‘Home’ underscores these struggles. It’s a tender song that speaks of a need to belong somewhere safe. ‘Unnil kaadhal kaana’ and ‘Please yenna appadi paakadhey’ are a refreshing change from the high-decibel, almost indistinguishable soundtracks of recent hit movies.
Commendable as all this is, particularly for a first-time director, there are also flaws that are alienating.
Anjali’s performance seems forced in many scenes, as if she’s caught between simultaneously being outrageous and a relatable girl-next-door. Shanti Priya, as Ramya’s mother, brings a more layered performance.
Ramya’s love interests through the years, played by Hridhu Haroon, Teejay Arunasalam, and Sashank Bommireddipalli, are hardly fleshed out. Maybe it flips the Kollywood trend of writing two-dimensional heroines, but the film loses out on credible counterpoints for its protagonist.
However, what suffers most is the politics. As the story moves across Ramya’s school years to her thirties, it often feels as if Bad Girl is striving to be radically feminist without upsetting anyone too much.
At one point, a fuming Ramya describes an ex’s current girlfriend as “some high-society maida maavu girl” to indicate the woman’s pale skin. The intent to question ideas of beauty rings hollow coming from a light-eyed, also pale-skinned woman, with no introspection, who reminisces in her thirties that she has “never been single since she was 15 years old”.
Bad Girl boldly speaks up for women’s rights to explore their sexual desires. But it fails to understand that for dark-skinned, lowered-caste women in South Asia, that exploration is laced with Brahmanical and Eurocentric parameters for worth. There are parts of them that are rejected in ways Ramya will never experience.
Ramya rebels against the constraints of her orthodox Brahmin family. But this is often a reaction to finding them tiresome rather than a feminist endeavour to question caste hierarchy. Her fights remain for herself and not for a true anti-caste sisterhood.
All women are oppressed, yes. But we are not all oppressed equally. Nor are we all desired equally. Caste, class, and race collude to determine who is desirable and who is not. This nexus decides whose feminist inspections of sexual politics are amplified and whose never make it on to the screen.
Bad Girl had plenty to navigate against: the row triggered by the film’s teaser, the cuts imposed by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), or the market-based choices made by Vetri Maaran’s Grass Root Film Company, which bankrolled the film.
And to be fair, the theatrical release, with the 20% cuts reportedly demanded by the CBFC, cannot be the same film that won multiple accolades, including the prestigious Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC) award at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
But while Bad Girl certainly has heart, sometimes it’s hard to relate to, let alone empathise with, its protagonist.
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.
‘Bad Girl is the Tamil chick flick I always wanted to watch’: Dir Varsha Bharath