My opening line for this review was: every girl in a relationship or desirous of getting into a relationship should watch this film.
But then, I realized there is something vital here that every father who thinks he knows what’s best for his daughter must also experience.
In The Girlfriend, writer-director Rahul Ravindran (who plays the kindest professor since Vinod Khanna in Imtihaan) gives the male protagonist a really hard time. Vikram (Dheekshith Shetty) is the sort of brash dude who thinks every girl on the college campus is in love with him. He can’t be blamed for thinking what he does. No one has ever given him reason to feel he isn’t God’s Chosen one.
So when Vikram chooses Bhuma Devi—yup, that’s her name and blame her father for it—played ably by Rashmika Mandanna to be his girlfriend the timid repressed girl, emotionally abused by her arrogant father (Rao Ramesh playing true to type), Bhuma nods docilely, as she has done all her life.
The Girlfriend is not your new revolutionary Female Hero film which breaks the glass ceiling. Rather, it’s a film that wants to break Bhuma’s relationship with Vikram. Curiously, we don’t get to see or know anything about Vikram except through an extended cameo moment when the resplendent Rohini shows up as Vikram’s tongue-tied mom.
The way the sequence unfolds to tell us how tyrannical patriarchy runs through his family, is like a roadside poster for toxicity. We just can’t miss the red flags even if we tried: Rahul Ravindran just won’t let us.
There is an underlying veneer of obviousness in the presentation that could have easily been avoided. This applies to the characters as well as the situations in the script. One embarrassing in-your-face sequence has to do with a bowl of noodles in a college canteen, which Vikram angrily throws at his friend’s face. Just before this act of defiance, we are informed that the noodles are “very hot.”
The dearth of tact hits the otherwise powerful film in unexpected ways. The second half gets particularly brutish, as if to make the material more massy. The confrontation between Vikram and Bhuma’s father is so obstreperous it feels as if it was directed by Raghvendra Rao while Rahul Ravindran was napping.
On the other hand, some of the moments between Bhuma Devi and her new friend Maya (Anu Emmanuel) seem more vital and relevant than what Bhuma shares on the screen with Vikram, the love of her life that shouldn’t be. The love relationships seem cramped more by textbook definitions of toxicity than by the actual pressures on the couple to transcend conformist conventions.
In spite of its flaws, some nearly fatal like the climax, which is meant to be liberating but is actually a hurried ‘happy ending’ for the Shero, The Girlfriend whips up quite a heady brew of gender discrimination and Daddy issues. Sequences such as the one where Bhuma feels the walls of the bathroom closing in during a shower, or the way she reflexively grabs her dupatta each time she steps out, indicates the presence of a film that not quite rises up to the goals that it sets for itself.
