'Bad Girl': How Varsha Bharath Crafted A Coming-Of-Age Film That Lets Women Be Messy

There is always a girl at the centre. A girl who asks too many questions, who feels too much, who cannot seem to learn the rules of her own containment. Indian cinema has rarely been kind to her. She is punished or reformed, lifted into virtue or dropped into ruin. What is startling about Varsha Bharath’s 'Bad Girl' is how it refuses to grant this girl a neat ending.

Ramya, played with startling precision by Anjali Sivaraman, moves from teenage restlessness to thirtysomething weariness, and in that span carries the marks of a generation of women who were promised liberation but handed rules dressed up as choices. The Tamil-language film, produced by Vetri Maaran’s Grass Root Film Company, won the NETPAC Award at its world premiere in Rotterdam. It has since travelled across continents — Shanghai, Valencia, and Toulouse — collecting prizes along the way. But its real achievement is less in your face: the way it lingers in the body of anyone who has ever been told that desiring too much is unbecoming.

Bharath says project began with a provocation: “I started by writing the story of a ‘really slutty girl’”. In the process of writing and filming, her provocation evolved into something closer to an interrogation of her own life. “The Western feminist idea of sexual liberalism didn’t quite apply to me,” she says. “That would probably explain why the meandering last act of the film has more questions than answers. I still don’t have the answers.”

There is a candour here that unsettles. Bharath belongs to a generation that came of age watching heroes who stalked, slapped, or rescued women into love. The alternatives — pious women as paragons of sacrifice — were no less suffocating. Bad Girl emerges from this tension: an insistence that women’s lives cannot be reduced to either cautionary tales or saintly archetypes.

The film’s synopsis is deceptively simple. At fifteen, Ramya falls in love with Nalan, her classmate, their bond nurtured in secret Yahoo Messenger chats. In college, she clings to Arjun with desperation, fearing love’s inevitable abandonment. In her thirties, bruised by breakups, she scrolls dating apps and collides with old ghosts. None of these phases offer resolution. Instead, they sketch the outline of a woman who keeps asking, “What is wrong with me? How can I make him love me? Who am I if I don’t love him anymore? What is home?”

What holds these years together is not continuity of plot but of texture. Ramya’s monologues run through the film like background static. In a conversation with Homegrown, Sivaraman describes this with striking clarity: “We’ll be walking along through the day and in our heads we’ll have our little monologues playing, like a little commentator constantly going. And that’s exactly what we wanted to show in the movie… she always has this inner monologue going on.” It is this interiority — the constant, nagging voice of self-surveillance — that makes Bad Girl feel both intimate and unsettling.

Sivaraman’s preparation for the role was bodily. She tells Homegrown, “I worked from my memory a lot. Just things like body language and expressions and hair and, you know, nails and all of those little, little things… I tried to observe people, children and even adults, how they walk, how they talk.”

There is a moment late in the film, after Ramya’s mother’s farewell, when her thoughts about her mother and the generations before her are suddenly interrupted. Sivaraman explains why this mattered.“Because everything that’s unsaid is also said… the unsaid bits are things that we’re thinking about.” All that is 'unsaid' is the film’s true subject. Ramya is not a character of grand confessions. She is instead what Sivaraman calls, “...just a lover girl." In a culture where that desire is constantly judged, her openness becomes radical.

When asked about the label, Bharath says: “I actually feel very, very happy every time someone calls my film a chick flick because I want to embrace that term with a lot of pride.” It is a reclamation. For decades, films about women have been treated as trivial diversions, relegated to the pink ghetto of “mindless entertainment”. Bharath says that chick flicks can hold philosophical depth, that they can be the site where women’s lives are both ordinary and extraordinary.

This cultural turn matters. If Bad Girl is radical, it is because it treats fickleness, longing, and mistakes as valid forms of existence. In India’s cinematic history, the woman’s arc has often been a moral one: redemption or punishment. Bharath and Sivaraman assert something else— what Joan Didion once called “the implacable I". A woman who is neither exemplary nor condemned, but simply alive.

Bad Girl pauses, it doesn't end. Bharath explains: “I wanted it to have a very slice of life quality where I didn’t have one climactic moment. Ramya’s journey continues, which is why I wanted to not really give a hard stop to the film.” In this refusal of finality lies the film’s politics. The girl who could not be contained at fifteen remains uncontainable at thirty-two. She still walks among us, monologues running, asking questions without answers. Bharath tells us she wonders how the film will age: “I’ll be the happiest person if chick flicks and women’s stories are so common and so progressive that this film seems dated.” It is difficult to imagine Bad Girl becoming irrelevant. The film stays because it will not resolve itself, and in that suspension, it precisesly captures the texture of women’s lives.

You can watch 'Bad Girl' in cinemas from Friday, September 26 onwards.

You can follow Varsha here.

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