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), carry over into Ramya’s later years. Now 32 and single after a break-up with Irfan (Teejay Arunasalam), Ramya reassesses her choices and her tortured relationship with her mother Sundari.

Bad Girl is a feminine, feminist riposte to films that explore the highs and lows of romantic relationships from the male perspective. Bharath’s ear for conversational dialogue and eye for scene-setting are so confident, so smooth that it’s sometimes easy to forget what she is doing here.

The 110-minute movie examines complex and complicated female desires with humour, tenderness and rare acuity. Ramya is messy, self-pitying, prone to mistakes and repeated behaviour patterns. She defines her self-worth by her relationships.

Bharath’s observational approach, ably executed by cinematographers Preetha Jayaraman, Jagadeesh Ravi and Prince Anderson, has a stylised edge. Pop colours and wide-angle lenses bring out Ramya’s dreaminess. Amit Trivedi’s lovely songs accompany the lurchings of Ramya’s heart.

There is solid detailing in the scenes set in the school and college. Orkut, Skype, girls who insist on going to the toilet as a group, conversations about periods and coloured bras – the movie lays out deeply familiar experiences. Ramya’s mother Sundari even has an entirely plausible explanation for brain drain.

The question that Ramya is forever asking herself – why am I this way – is answered not just by her but also by Sundari. While the supporting cast is very good, Shantipriya is especially lovely as a woman who finds strange connections with a daughter she is unable to understand.

There is room in Ramya’s self-centred universe for Sundari and other older women like her – captured in Ramya’s observation, “Grannies, mothers, aunts and sisters… when they are unable to break free, they bind us with their shackles. Breaking free may seem like betrayal but it is an act of love.”

The movie too is an act of love, finding the place for forgiveness while holding on to a woman’s solo journey of self-discovery.

Anjali Sivaraman, the talented actor from the film Cobalt Blue and the web series Class, is present in nearly every scene in Bad Girl. Sivaraman is excellent, never once out of step with Ramya’s quest for meaning. Sivaraman is especially effective at portraying Ramya’s petulance and, later, maturity.

Ramya is so relatable that she walks in our midst. Rarely has a heroine been this exasperating, and this honest.

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