Girlfriend

There’s a lot of bad WLW movies. What there isn’t is lots of fun-bad WLW movies. Enter Girlfriend. Girlfriend is both the worst WLW movie I’ve seen in a while and yet also the most fun I’ve had watching a WLW movie in a while.

The film follows two roommates and friends, Sapna and Tanya. Tanya is in love with Sapna while Sapna seems oblivious to her friend’s blatant and increasingly creepy crush. While Tanya is out of town, Sapna meets Rahul. Rahul initially pretends to be gay in order to get close to Sapna. After discovery of his deception, this deception, Rahul continues his pursuit of Sapna with lighthearted, physical comedy-laden stalking. Sapna apparently finds this charming and they become a couple. However, Tanya returns and her possessiveness over Sapna kicks into high gear. She tries to elaborately cockblock the couple and sabotage the relationship to no avail. Eventually, the truth of Tanya’s affections comes to a head as she acts increasingly unstable.

If anyone in Girlfriend reacted like a real, semi-intelligent person, this movie couldn’t exist. Sapna is so ignorant of Tanya’s possessive behaviour and attempts to sabotage her relationship as to be completely unbelievable. It ends up seeming like wilful ignorance. Rahul catches on sooner but he too reacts to Tanya’s attempts to seduce him (alleged as a test of his faithfulness) by calling Tanya a really good friend. Additionally, this core relationship of Sapna and Rahul is based on the grounds of him lying about being gay to get close to her and then apparently following her around everywhere she goes. Each character’s idiocy evens out in a way that actually kind of works. These characters are all shitty and I don’t really feel sympathy for any of them. Therefore, I don’t feel bad that any of them get caught in this ridiculous mess.

So Girlfriend is also a musical which I didn’t know going in. I was absolutely blown away when suddenly there was a musical number. I almost regret mentioning it in this review because it was such a fun surprise. The musical numbers are all spectacular. They’re ridiculous, unnecessary and far from adding to the plot generally make things slightly less clear. I adore them. They’re really just extended music videos that interrupt the main plot and have nothing to do with anything. It’s so fun.

On a technical level, Girlfriend is a delightful mess. It has that sort of very over the top editing style which seems common in Indian films. There’s obnoxious music cues, liberal use of slow motion, more cuts than fully necessary and a whole lot of dramatic zoom-ins. Its editing style is like a hybrid between over the top action movies and soap operas. And frankly, thank god. Without all the ridiculous visuals, all this movie would be left with is its god-awful script. So, sure. Throw in another musical number or slow motion sequence, anything to distract from the fact that this script never should have seen the light of day.

Girlfriend is pretty offensive. Stereotypes are absolutely everywhere in here, especially gay ones. Girlfriend absolutely does feature a man-hating, obsessive and unstable lesbian as its primary queer character. Definitely the least fun bit of the movie is a monologue of Tanya’s where she admits she was molested as a child. This acts as an explanation of why she’s Like This as an adult. Yikes! It also conflates lesbianism with being transgender; Tanya explains her identity as a lesbian as being a man trapped in a woman’s body. All of that is bad. Had the movie been 10% better, I’d be offended. But Girlfriend is too stupid to be fully offensive. It’s not that Girlfriend doesn’t understand gay people or women, it’s simpler than that. Girlfriend just doesn’t understand people.

There is one thing about the queer experience Girlfriend gets right. It happens in a flashback to Sapna and Tanya’s one drunken night they spent together in college. Despite being indoors, there’s a moderate breeze which artfully blows the women’s hair around and stuff. This is true. In real life, lesbian sex is always accompanied by its own wind machine. That’s why so many queer women have short hair, it’s just easier to deal with when every time you go to bed with another woman, wind happens.

There’s a number of movies featuring a predatory WLW character obsessing over her straight friend. All of those movies are cancelled. Girlfriend is the ultimate and the only one we need. Offensive and generally bad as it is, I had a lot of fun watching Girlfriend. It’s funnier than a lot of WLW comedies I’ve seen. Never by anything it did intentionally of course but regardless of intent, I laughed a lot at this mess of a movie. Girlfriend is absolutely bad and a mess but at least it has the decency to be the kind of mess that keeps on surprising me and making me laugh.

Overall rating: 3.5/10

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