Bad Girl

In Varsha Bharath’s Bad Girl, the eponymous protagonist keeps returning to one question that hovers over her life like a single dark cloud obscuring the galaxy of stars beyond. “Naa yen ipdi irukken?” (Why am I like this?) The girl is Ramya, a name that is so commonplace in South India that it could be its own Jane Doe for half a country. For a whole generation that grew up between the 1980s and the first decade of the 21st century, the name bears no real characteristic. In a certain class of society, it is as regular as music class after school or the insistence to speak in textbook perfect English outside of the classroom. Bad Girl begins around the mid-2000s — a generation that was sneaking mobile phones into school and beta tested Orkut before the exodus to Facebook; so probably the last to stick to a name like Ramya. And yet, there are three Ramyas in the classroom. Bad Girl’s Ramya (Anjali Sivaraman), daughter of a teacher (Shanthipriya as Sundari) in the same school, is so feral that she strives to be the main character in her life, a life of banality according to her. The life of all Ramyas.

The most terrifying stretch of growing up is between the feeling that you are the only one who is going through life—masturbation, bleeding, heaving, wet dreams, shattered hearts—to knowing, no, there are others, too, who are transgressing. “Naan yen ippudi irukkein? (Why am I like this?),” a frustrated, teenaged Ramya (Anjali Sivaraman) asks herself as Bad Girl opens, and you think the film will iron out this misconception—that no, she isn’t alone. But Bad Girl’s preoccupation is elsewhere. The central protagonist of the film, also its central hurdle, Ramya pulls the film from her high-school years, to college, to her early thirties, roughly more than a decade. The film begins frenetically, moving swiftly between her inner and outer world—dialogues delivered in the same decibel—between mid-shots and close-ups, between dreams and reality, life-rooted and life-fabulated. Even the close-ups are wide, rushing the whole world into the image of her face in the trembling foreground.

For debutant director Varsha Bharath, ‘Bad Girl’ is a product of labour and passion. When the teaser was released earlier this year, it was caught in a web of controversies. So much so that the court ordered the makers to remove it from YouTube over its portrayal of Brahmins and young children getting addicted to cigarettes and alcohol (It was later uploaded with minor cuts). But, five minutes into ‘Bad Girl’, you forget all these controversies and get hooked on the film. That’s what a refreshing filmmaking voice does to you! Ramya (Anjali Sivaraman) belongs to an orthodox Brahmin family, where women have to be the primary caregivers. If you have periods, you become untouchable. But Ramya, right from her young age, defies these practices and rebels. And certainly, she earns the wrath of her grandmother and mother, too. Irksome parents, grandparents, pimples, and disciplinarian rules do not and cannot break Ramya.