Varsha Bharath’s Bad Girl is a bold, witty, and layered Tamil coming-of-age film that examines a young woman’s chaotic journey of love, rebellion, heartbreak, and selfhood with humour, defiance, and feminist flair. Here’s the review of the film by Saibal Chatterjee.

Bad Girl (Tamil film), directed by Varsha Bharath and produced by Vetri Maaran’s Grassroot Film Company, is a striking feminist coming-of-age drama starring Anjali Sivaraman. Presented by Vetri Maaran and Anurag Kashyap, it explores patriarchy, parental pressure, and women’s freedom across different life stages. The film premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (Tiger Competition), winning the NETPAC Award, and is now available in theatres nationwide with a Hindi dub.

A Feminist Coming-of-Age with Irony

A girl raised in a conservative, Chennai family struggles to steer her dreams and desires past the pincers of societal constraints and parental pressures in first-time director Varsha Bharath’s Bad Girl, a remarkably vibrant coming-of-age Tamil film.

Produced by Vetri Maaran’s Grassroot Film Company and presented by him along with Anurag Kashyap, Bad Girl wears its feminism lightly and delivers its core message with a generous dash of free-spirited irony tempered with underlying humour.

It premiered earlier this year in the Tiger Competition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam and won the NETPAC Award. A Hindi dub of the film is now in theatres nationwide.

Writer-director Bharath, who assisted Vetri Maaran in Visaranai and Vada Chennai, crafts a lively and thought-provoking takedown of patriarchy that celebrates the chaos of a mind that is perpetually at odds with itself and the world caught in its rigid ways.

It follows Ramya (played brilliantly by Anjali Sivaraman) through three different stages of her life and the trials and travails of dealing with boys/men who do not have it in them to be the right guy she is looking for.

Ramya is a female protagonist of the kind we rarely, if ever, see in Indian cinema. Messy and unpredictable, she is never sure of her own next move. Her mind is a jumble of ideas and fantasies, all of which she owns despite the alarm bells that come with them.

Home may be a prison, school may be a cage, and love affairs may be an inevitable slide into heartbreak but she isn’t one to take a step back when matters do not end the way she wants them to.

Ramya embraces her flaws, failings and failures and labours on regardless. The pace and the rhythm of the film reflect the whirligig that her life is. Questions swim relentlessly in Ramya’s mind but she does not baulk when she does not find easy answers to them.

Ramya’s World of Desire, Rebellion and Fantasy

To begin with, in the mid-noughties, Ramya is an emotionally ruffled 15-year-old schoolgirl fed up with the restrictions imposed on her mother Sundari (Shanthi Priya), grandmother and father. She yearns to break free.
Her heart envisions a home – Ramya dreams of a dwelling in a vast field, a cozy corner on the terrace or the cramped confines of a tarpaulin tent – where she could be all alone with the boy of her imagination.

The boy in her recurrent fantasy keeps changing – he could be the class head boy, a close friend’s brother, or even Prabhu Deva – but, as Virginia Woolf espoused in an extended essay published nearly one hundred years ago, Ramya’s steady desire is for “a room of one’s own”.

That is where the rub lies for a girl who takes her acnes and pimples in her stride but cannot tame her racing mind and raging hormones. Is something wrong with me, she asks herself as doubts begin to assail her.
The thoughts that she entertains and the acts of defiance that she dares to indulge in are strictly forbidden by her parents. Punishment is prompt. But that does not stop Ramya. She is smitten by Nalan (Hridhu Haroon), the charmingly self-effacing new boy in her class.

The surreptitious relationship, conducted in the safe realms of Yahoo Messenger and, during a school excursion, in a secret nocturnal rendezvous away from prying eyes, lands her in trouble with the school principal and her mother, a teacher in the same institution.

In the next stage of her life, Ramya is in a Chennai college but lives in a hostel and not with her parents, a conscious decision. She is in love with the most popular boy on the campus, Arjun (Sashank Bommireddipalli), two years her senior.

The flighty Arjun leaves her in the lurch. Angry and confused, Ramya, nursing a broken heart, punishes herself but does not shy away from inflicting some pain publicly on the boy himself.

Freedom, Love and the Price of Defiance

In the middle of the Covid pandemic, Ramya, now in her early 30s, is out in the wider world as a corporate employee who has just broken up with live-in partner Irfan (Teejay Arunasalam) and moved into the apartment of a friend who is weeks away from her wedding. The life she aspires is still not within her grasp.

In the world around Ramya, everybody seems to be unquestioningly settling into matrimony and domesticity. But for her, her freedom matters more than anything else. There is a price to be paid for the pursuit of a home where she is truly unencumbered by expectations, preordained roles and forced dependence on the opposite sex.

Bad Girl is irreverent, unapologetic and wildly in-your-face with its portrait of a girl who thinks nothing of fumbling and faltering her way through as she strives for a place in a patriarchal world where women are constantly told to play by the rules.

Ramya doesn’t. Neither does the director. Together, they create a film that hits home with the force of a gale without having to cry itself hoarse to get its point across.