The Chicanery Of 'Bad Girl' Makers To Trigger Outrage And Play Victim

All through last week, social media platforms were typically abuzz with yet another outrage bout. And this time it was over the Tamil film provocatively titled Bad Girl.

Directed by debutante Varsha Bharath, the film, as the title leaves you in no doubt, is about a schoolgirl who attempts with a rebel chutzpah all that is deemed taboo and illegal too for teens — smoking, drinking, and physical relationship with the opposite sex.

A section of conservative Tamils were aghast at the seeming promiscuity of the protagonist Ramya as shown in the film's trailer/teaser. 

Bad Girl, produced by well-known directors Vetrimaran and Anurag Kashyap, was though more pilloried by Tamil Brahmins as they felt that the film showed the community in a bad light as the trailer did not leave any doubt about the caste of the philandering and fun-loving lead. 

In a particular line in the trailer, the heroine's grandmom is shown to be using a patois that is decidedly specific to Tamil Brahmins.

They were quickly up in arms that they were singled out in the film because that is the kosher thing in Tamil Nadu right now. While Tambrahms, as they are generally referred to, do have a ground to feel vilified in the current Dravidian-dominated phase in Tamil Nadu, the director though said that she had brought it out in her film what she has seen in life.

Varsha Bharath, going by the sketchy pointers available on the internet, belongs to the Tambrahm community. So is the one playing the lead girl, Anjali Svivaraman (daughter of singer Chitra Iyer). 

Varsha defended herself in an interview with The Federal saying, "I just wanted to tell a story based on my experiences. If I was doing a historical or a political thriller, I could have researched and set my character in another community. This is a human drama so it made sense for me to root the character in a world I am familiar with to allow me to tell an authentic story."

Also, at any rate, this was not a film but just a trailer/teaser, the outcry over it would seem a little disproportionate. But it also seems quite probable that the Bad Girl team was kind of angling for some controversy and the trailer was cut to elicit outrage ahead of its premiere at the ongoing film festival at Rotterdam.

One film, but two trailers?

Bad Girl is among the 14 movies chosen for the 'Tiger Competition' at the festival. And as it happens, the trailer for the film festival was released more than a month back.

Yes, the trailer for the festival is slightly different from the one that was released in Chennai in a specially organised function with carefully chosen invitees including director Mysskin, who generally gets called to such events to bombast something controversial so that there is a media spotlight on the film.

It is a typical marketing farce in operation in Tamil filmdom (something similar exists in other language industries too).

But Mysskin's infamous crude public talk was not needed to attract attention to the film, the film's trailer seems to have been tailored in such a manner to set off an unholy hullabaloo.

Before we go into the specifics of the trailer, it is pertinent to point out that films, which are on a journey of festival circuits, don't organise splashy events to launch a trailer. Bad Girl, despite having its official festival trailer launched earlier, chose to have a headline event in Chennai.

For a film that is not targeting immediate theatrical release (the makers say that it will hit the cinema halls after its festival visits), such a programme was a bit surprising.

Festival circuit regulars know for a fact that films that can show themselves to be 'targeted' usually stand a better chance to get noticed among the crowd of releases at the festival, and get awards. It is again not an unsurprising ploy in the film industry which lives and dies by the dictum— publicity, good or bad, is the oxygen for survival.

Bad Girl not only opted for a trailer launch function but also chose to have a cut that was discernibly different from the one made for the festival. While the sum and substance are similar, the devil is embedded in the passing details.

The trailer released at the function in Chennai (we will call it the 'home trailer') has a scene in which the lead act drops the emotional blackmail line of 'suicide' to her mom. This part is not in the festival cut where such stuff is generally frowned upon. Suicide as a provocative juvenile line is for the local audience.

The target may have been somebody else

The line which shows the lead character to be from a Tambrahm family is present in both versions. So evidently there is no mischief there. But it is elsewhere, as it can be argued that the makers were actually hoping to deliberately instigate the right-wing political groups. To be precise, the ever-on-the-boil BJP supporters.

A shot of the heroine's parents participating in a 'go corona and vessels clanging' is shown only in the home trailer and that too prominently at the trailer's sharp denouement. It stands out even though it doesn't organically belong to the film's story and its spirit (which is about a young girl's rite of passage of growing up).

By including this seemingly touchy act for the right-wing groups, the Bad Girl team was most likely looking to incite the former. But that didn't happen, as Tambrahms and conservatives in Tamil Nadu quickly took it upon themselves to castigate Bad Girl. That changed the focus and the flow of events.

The producers and the director of the film would have muttered a quick thank you as the controversy anyway gave them good visibility in the media that they could put to use at the festival.

Of course, this point is a conjecture, but what gives it a sturdy ring of plausibility is the fact the film's director Varsha, has been speaking with a fork tongue to the audience here and to English-speaking journalists.

Stick to one lane, director

At the home trailer event, Varsha specifically said that the film is not an attempt to normalise smoking, drinking, and physical relationships among women.

But in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, she said something that sounds the exact opposite: "It's such a big part of so many of our lives that it's impossible to hide it at this point. I don't see any way around this except to actually just tell our stories and get them used to it." 

To the Tamil audience, she says the idea is not to make drinking and smoking seem regular among women. To a magazine that caters to a different section, she says that the point is to make them get accustomed to it. Stick to one lane, Varsha!

Of course, what is out in the public is just the trailer and not the film. It is also a given that a team is at liberty to market its film in whatever way it sees as befitting. But a team that comprises the ‘woke vanguards’ Vetri and Anurag Kashyap needs to show more intellectual integrity. What is on view though is just the old ploy to play the victim by triggering outrage.

The film’s fate at the Rotterdam festival contest will be known in a day or two. But with two trailers driving home different sensibilities, and with two diverging responses from its director to the same point, the Bad Girl team has, it seems, already lost the credibility race.