The Girlfriend & The Quiet Collapse Of Desire
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For a film about interpersonal friction between a deeply incompatible pair — where one love-bombs the other into submission — it fails to interrogate the latter’s desires, or lack thereof, writes Aditya Shrikrishna.
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A YOUNG WOMAN walks into college on her first day. She, a daughter of a single father, is alone in the city for the first time after exhausting everything out of the faint rebellious spirit within her. She is here for her MA in Literature, friend to books and fiend to expression. Growing up, she found kindred spirits in books more than in life, she says, and adds that her dream is to write a book so that little children find themselves in her creation. Bhooma Devi (Rashmika Mandanna) introduces herself thus in Rahul Ravindran’s The Girlfriend, and there couldn’t be a more compact establishment of an introvert. She doesn’t ask for help to carry her heavy suitcase two floors up. She is nervous. When that help is offered, she doesn’t even reply. She is shy. No one asked her, and yet she shares food with strangers in college. Bhooma lives her life as if the weight of the world rests on her; she tiptoes around campus and thinks a hundred times before uttering a word. Silence is her refuge. Stream the latest Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil and Kannada releases, with OTTplay Premium's Power Play monthly pack, for only Rs 149. |
The Girlfriend is Ravindran’s third Telugu directorial; his National Award-winning debut Chi La Sow (2018) is one of the best romantic dramas of the last decade. The new film challenges the status quo of the romantic dynamic we regularly see in mainstream fare, especially in Telugu and Tamil. The film wants to underline that it’s not even romance when toxicity thrives over mutual respect. Things get to a boil quickly here. A rapid ragging episode introduces us to Vikram (Dheekshith Shetty), a fellow first-year student who displays enough surface-level charm and talent required to become the college heartthrob. He basks in the desire demonstrated by other women for him, especially Durga (Anu Emmanuel), whom he seems to be weighing with a careful focus. In a sudden turn of events that includes an unnecessary show of masculine strength and violence — a sign of things to come — Bhooma is watching her favourite actor Nani’s film in Vikram’s hostel room. There are enough cues for aggressive, persistent behaviour here, but 'no' is not a word that comes out of Bhooma easily, if they do at all. When she is about to leave, he forces a kiss on her, leaving her confused and almost paralysed to receive rather than deny. Ravindran films this in close-up with Vikram’s persistence as clear as Bhooma’s numbing doubts. While there is no explicit consent, the equation here is unambiguous, as one thing leads to another, and Bhooma finds herself in a relationship that wasn’t in the vicinity of her ambitions. Watch Rahul Ravindran's debut film Chi La Sow on Sun NXT, available with your OTTplay Premium subscription. From here, The Girlfriend is a ringside view of everything wrong in Bhooma’s reluctant courtship with a toxic boyfriend. Ravindran bestows every known red flag on this man. He tells Durga that Bhooma, simple and demure, is the kind of girl he wants, and Durga, hippier with heart on her sleeve, could never be like that. It is a subtle preview to the slut shaming he indulges in later. He tells Bhooma that he wants his love to be like his mother. She goes on to tidy up his room and do his laundry. He disallows her from paying for a meal, saying that’s an insult in front of his friends. He asks her to stop talking to a male friend, and when she even mildly wonders at this absurdity, he thrashes the guy. |
It's curious to note what luxury The Girlfriend accords to whom. Durga, early on, the frontrunner that she is, gets to articulate her desire to Vikram. Vikram, as a heterosexual male, gets a free-for-all. Forget explaining, Bhooma doesn’t even get the opportunity to introspect on her desire(s). The film hinges a lot on Bhooma’s closed nature — it doesn’t feel the need to show us her inner turmoil beyond reactionary elements to Vikram’s flagrant behaviour. More than anything, for a film about interpersonal friction arising from a widely incompatible pair of people where one love bombs the other into submission, it fails to interrogate Bhooma’s own desires or lack thereof. Maybe one can chalk it down to Bhooma’s inhibitions as a compulsive wallflower, but the politics of desire is not absent for the subject, despite the film keeping it away from the observer’s gaze. We see Vikram walk out of Bhooma’s hostel room every morning, Ravindran makes a montage of it, but we never witness Bhooma’s own post-coital moments. This is especially stark because of her enlightened repartee to Vikram and his friends’ rampant slut shaming in the climax. A large part of The Girlfriend is watching Bhooma cosplay as the traditional girlfriend before she assumes her future role in Vikram’s life as the trad wife caring for him and their home. But this goes on for too long, which keeps Vikram in focus and Bhooma as the silent victim. We are watching 'The Boyfriend' more than 'The Girlfriend'. The film is afraid to imagine Bhooma as a sexual creature, making one wonder if it considers it humiliating to do so. ALSO READ | The Girlfriend: A Superb Rashmika Mandanna Headlines This Sensitive Take On Toxic Relationships |
There are coming-of-age films, and there are films that manifest storm in their love stories as life-changing exercises. The Girlfriend exists somewhere in the middle, lending itself to comparison with recent films like Ahammed Khabeer’s June (2019), Roopa Rao’s Gantumoote (2019), Prabhuram Vyas’s Lover (2024) and Varsha Bharath’s Bad Girl (2025). In all these films, the young women protagonists negotiate the terms of their passion, endearment and fulfilment with themselves. In shabby, messy and even graceful ways. June, too, is surprised by an unexpected kiss, only a more innocent one than what Vikram springs on Bhooma. All of them — June, Gantumoote’s Meera, Lover’s Divya and Bad Girl’s Ramya — get to wrestle with feelings that they wholly endorse and those that they don’t. Ramya sneaks into her boyfriend’s hostel room while Vikram lets himself in to Bhooma’s. We fully get Ramya’s (or Meera in the library in Gantumoote) dogged determination in this, but The Girlfriend refuses to pry into Bhooma grappling with such a moment. Instead, the film accords more prominence to Bhooma performing reproductive labour — looking, picking and cleaning after Vikram. Interestingly, even films that focus on oppressive caregiving, such as The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) and Feminichi Fathima (2024), find space to elaborate on the presence, absence or rejection of intimacy. |
The film, like Bhooma, lacks the vocabulary to confront her desire, or even her feelings. It is the cinema of excess — make Vikram so bad that he is easy to hate. Extend scenes beyond their sell-by date. A scene with Vikram’s mother, Bhooma, and a mirror goes on far too long. As if the futuristic reflection isn’t enough, we see Bhooma adopt the mother’s costume. This tiny addition crashes the point instead of driving it home. A similar scene transpires in June, where June’s boyfriend’s father tells her that she doesn’t need to go to work and lists the virtues of being a housewife. The boyfriend’s mother stands behind June, but mute and entirely out of focus, rendering the scene with invisible power. A crucial syntax missing in The Girlfriend is solidarity, something that could have given voice to Bhooma’s reflections. In Lover, Divya has by her side a trusty Aishu, not only to make her realise Arun’s growing insignificance in her life but also to challenge her decisions. Ramya’s trajectory would be wildly different without a Selvi in her life, and the same goes for June without an Abhirami aka Mottachi. In The Girlfriend, Durga reappears too late and does too little. Lesser said about Bhooma’s immediate friends, the better — they not only fail to stand up for her, but they also behave like pre-teens at times. At her lowest moment, during a very public walk of shame, not a soul in the college has anything uplifting to say. The inclusivity the other films display is missing here, leaving none to help Bhooma navigate the tensions between desire and disappointment, elation and heartbreak. She is left to make sense of her past, present and future all alone. Admirable. But terribly limiting in impact. |
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