A cause celebre the moment the trailer was released, Bad Girl prompted attacks on its more famous producer, the director Vetrimaaran, for portraying oppression in a Brahmin household and not among other castes. Those following politics in India will know that this is nothing new, for a considerable majority of the Brahmin community willingly victimizes itself and engages in petty whataboutery at the slightest critique of its outsized privilege, and unfortunately, they are especially emboldened by the neoliberal fascist government of Modi to demonize their critics. In the case of Bad Girl, however, I think they have conveniently forgotten that the director, Varsha Bharath, is from the same community and milieu, and invisibilizing her for bigger targets from a different caste only reinforces their casteist patriarchy. And like how knee-jerk reactions thrive on the social media landscape for the slightest utterance of “Mughals” or “Nehru” by the Hindu right, long-worded responses defending the film and even critiquing it for not being progressive enough proliferated on social media, all on the basis of one trailer. Regardless of the intention, Varsha Bharath’s voice is still stifled, and while one might criticize the trailer, one has to remember that a trailer does not make a movie.
Fortunately, Varsha Bharath is talented enough to ensure that her voice is at least heard by those who attempt to watch the film. Telling the coming-of-age story of Ramya (a feisty Anjali Sivaraman), a girl born to a conservative Brahmin household, Bad Girl follows her romantic relationships from school age until her 30s, all of which are at constant odds with the wants of her family. Divided into three segments, the first follows a scandalous school romance, the second her tortured college relationship, and finally, her attempts at happiness after a breakup in her 30s, an age where the pressure to get married has exponentially increased, especially because her friends have “settled” into their marriages.
It’s in the films’ first section where Bharath is at her best, establishing a cinematic style to match the flighty moods of her character. Ramya’s doe-eyed dreams of bourgeois bliss are frequently interrupted by the prevailing dogmas of family and society, which Bharath films through saturated sun-lit shots broken by sharp edits. Never one to back down from pressure, Ramya responds with rebellious rejoinders of her own, and her confused, fluctuating shifts between romantic longing and defiance set the film’s narrative machinery into motion. Bharath has certainly absorbed the language of commercial Tamil cinema through her usage of songs and witty punchlines, but unlike many lesser filmmakers, she is able to organically weave both into her film. Ramya’s romantic musical dreams are abruptly jolted by unwanted adults who cruelly snap her back into reality, and songs are sustained only when she and her boyfriend (Hridhu Haroon) are alone. Once word of her relationship gets out, the adults naturally quell it, and her mother (Shanthi Priya) transfers her to a different school. Enraged by her family’s attempts to control her life, she leaves her home and lives in a hostel.
Unfortunately, Bharath is unable to sustain the energy and clarity of this first stretch throughout the rest of the film. The second section involves a protracted, familiar saga about Ramya falling for a toxic boyfriend, and Bharath resorts to staid slo-mo coupled with sharp bursts of edits of Ramya’s memories of her relationship to capture her swoon and pain. But unlike in the film’s initial section, the director has nothing new to say about the nature of Ramya’s thoughts. And though Ramya does build friendships during this phase, these friends are rendered as nothing more than consolers.
Bad Girl’s final third, then, deals with her reconciliation with her family and herself, and Bharath bridges scenes of momentous importance with lazy sentimentality and shopworn truisms. Ramya’s mother becomes an object of sympathy whenever Bharath wishes to make a point, and any moment of reflection in that relationship is resolved by edgy jokes. However much Bharath used the accoutrements of commercial Tamil cinema to great effect in the first section, she, unfortunately, uses the trite narrative dramaturgy of the same lesser filmmakers to make her points in the film’s latter stages. Naturally, her conclusions are more progressive and her sustain-and-splinter style does sustain a baseline of engagement, but the director’s overreaching and self-conscious artiness and facile conclusions seem more awards-driven than anything more substantive or genuinely insightful. Bharath might go against the grain in her portrayal of Ramya, but a lack of reflection on her form and a certain genericism with regard to familial relationships and romance renders her defiance a far more limp than she clearly wants it to be.
Published as part of IFFR 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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