‘Bad Girl’ review: A terrific journey through a woman’s heart and soul

Girls will be girls – a truism as well as the title of Shuchi Talati’s 2024 movie about a model student’s encounters with the joys and perils of adolescence. Varsha Bharath’s Bad Girl doesn’t just take the coming-of-age conversation further but also expands it in a manner that resets the conventions of such movies.

Bharath’s terrific debut feature, premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam earlier this year, is out in cinemas. The Tamil-language movie, which Bharath has also written, follows Ramya (Anjali Sivaraman) between the ages of 15 and 32, through three stages of relationships with men who are seemingly unable to measure up to her ardour.

At school, Ramya is bored and restless, a bad student but a badder girl for her conventional family. Ramya’s mother Sundari (Shanti Priya), who teaches at the same school, is horrified to learn of Ramya’s involvement with the new pupil Nalan (Hridhu Haroon). Ramya’s moralistic grandmother isn’t surprised.

In college, Ramya appears to have found her together-forever, the dreamboat Arjun (Sashank Bommireddipalli). That dynamic is governed as much by Arjun’s personality as it is by Ramya’s idealised expectations from romance in general and men in particular.

The aftereffects of the bracing experience, through which Ramya is helped by her devoted friend Selvi (Saranya Ravichandran),...

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