Debutant director Varsha Bharath’s ‘Bad Girl’, now releasing in Hindi after a very successful run in Tamil, is the kind of cinema that raises the bar so high, one feels giddy with hope. On top, it is the ultimate clarion call for female teen rebellion with liberal references to sanitary pads and unprotected sex.
But there is much more to Ramya’s clamorous insubordination than meets the eye. In flashes, Bad Girl reminded me of Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls. But finally ‘Bad Girl’ is its own never-before-never-again beast.
Oh, didn’t I tell you as yet? Ramya is our acne-faced curly-haired protagonist, played by the acne-faced curly-haired immaculately cast Anjali Sivaraman. When we first meet the schoolgoing Ramya, she is so into boys and related matters that she feels like a waylaid teen who goes by the book of Teen Rebellion. Hurting her hardworking, honest-to-goodness mother, Sundari (Shanthipriya), who, unfortunately for Ramya, is a stern no-nonsense teacher in the very school where Ramya crushes over Nalan (Hridhu Haroon).
This “innocent” love story is doomed from the start. Varsha Bharath’s whimsical non-linear screenplay digs its heels into Ramya’s rocky love life, never judging her but always wondering where this capricious girl will go next…. Or is she a seeker all her life? Like Umrao Jaan, transported to a working-class milieu in the early years of this millennium, when love letters were replaced by sms texts. And the poetry is gone with the wink.
The narrative floats dreamily along with Ramya as she dates the wrong men. The toxic Arjun (Sashank Bommireddipalli) for one. Like all her relationships, this one too ends disastrously, with an ugly public spat which would leave any normal girl wounded and scarred for life.
Ramya is made of sterner stuff. She moves on to another relationship, with Irfan (Teejay Arunasalam), this time less toxic than the previous one. I am not sure why this one ended. Maybe Ramya is too much to handle for any man…I don’t know. Since the screenplay doesn’t judge her, why should we? It lets Ramya create as much havoc as she can possibly create in her own life, and then turns her life on its head.
The last movement of this oddball film is about Ramya, her mother Sundari and a cat named Madame who disappears when Mom leaves the windows open.
This is where the wacky film gets wise and cautionary.
Says Mom, “Just like Ramya, who is frantic about finding her cat after the windows are left open, I too worry about my daughter, try to keep the windows shut.”
Well said! And very well packaged, with all of Ramya’s blunders and goof-ups in life being given ‘breeding’ space. Interestingly, writer-director Varsha Bharath chooses to revisit Ramya’s love affairs in vivid flashbacks, almost as if to tell us, there will never be a happy present for our girl.
We can only wish Ramya all the best, hoping that her somewhat incredulous conscience awakening at the end (when she suddenly decides to be nice to her mother) is for real.
With a girl like Ramya, who can tell?
