‘Bad Girl’ director Varsha Bharath: ‘The mother-daughter relationship is the central romance’

In the poem Advice to Women, Eunice de Souza writes: “Keep cats, if you want to learn to cope with
the otherness of lovers.” This wisdom is learnt the hard way by the messy heroine of Varsha Bharath’s terrific Bad Girl.

The Tamil movie follows Ramya (Anjali Sivaraman) as she attempts to navigate personal problems, boyfriends and a complicated relationship with her mother Sundari (Shanti Priya). The cast includes Hridhu Haroon, Sashank Bommireddipalli, Teejay Arunasalam, Saranya Ravichandran – and cats. Felines were not only woven into Bharath’s screenplay but also contributed to Bad Girl in other ways, the 34-year-old filmmaker told Scroll.

Bad Girl was premiered at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam in February, where it won a NETPAC Award. Bharath’s debut feature, which has music by Amit Trivedi, was released in cinemas in Tamil Nadu on September 5. A Hindi dub, which has been supervised by Anurag Kashyap, came out on Friday.

Varsha Bharath studied electronic media at the MOP Vaishnav College For Women in Chennai. She started working as an assistant director when she was 19. Among the people she assisted was Bad Girl’s producer, the filmmaker Vetri Maaran.

In edited excerpts from an interview, Bharath speaks about why Bad Girl is now available in Hindi, how autobiographical the story actually is, and what the movie is trying to...

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