Rashmika Kept Telling Me How Much ‘The Girlfriend’ Was Going To Move Women: Director Rahul Ravindran

Rahul Ravindran vividly recollects the moment he wanted to attempt to do something like The Girlfriend. “There was this movement in south Indian cinema [a few years back] where the Devdas(s) were turning into soup boys. A Devdas would drink himself to death and destroy his life, but the latter would also make the girl suffer. These scenes were eliciting claps, and I looked at one of the songs that came during the peak of the movement,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter India. He wasn’t a filmmaker then, but he knew he wanted to turn things around in this context sometime soon. 

Cut to the present day, the filmmaker is witnessing women in theatres cheering loudly for an intricately written breakup scene in The Girlfriend, a relationship drama where Bhooma (Rashmika Mandanna), a woman stuck in a suffocated relationship with her college boyfriend Vikram (Dheekshith Shetty), finally gets to speak her mind. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter India, the filmmaker, who is fielding deeply emotional appreciation from women who feel seen by the film, discusses his writing choices.

How have the reactions to the film been?

A lot of people kept telling us that we were making a mistake and that we shouldn't be making this movie, as women don't come to theatres. But to be proved right is beautiful. I'm going to single-screen mass theatres, where 70 per cent of the crowd is women. We watched people in theatres go wild and cheer loudly for a line like, "Vikram, I want to break up with you."

I wrote this film from a place of second-hand empathy. Rashmika kept telling me when we were making this film, 'You don't know what you're making. You don't realise what you're making and how much it is going to move and speak to women. I know it because it spoke to me when I read the script.' Now I see what she meant.

Can you take us through your inspiration for the film?

There was an incident that I witnessed during my college days, when a friend's friend was dumped by his girlfriend. We didn't know the girl too well, and for about three or four days, he was a raging Devdas. A few days in, he came to my room and took me to the students' gents' restroom at 2.30 am, where he had written the girl's number on the wall and wrote, 'For sex, contact [her].' He was completely irrational and emotionally vulnerable, and at that moment, we knew that if we called him out, he would be antagonised. I never forgot the incident. 

Tell us about how the film fell into place?

The characters were imaginary. I wrote Vikram with a lot of empathy. It was important for me to understand him without judging him because I didn't want to make the Vikrams watching the film feel like they're villainised for the sake of it. The intention was to make him go back home and question himself. I don't make films to change people, but I'd like him to think and reflect.

My greed as a filmmaker is to tell stories with mainstream actors and producers because they reach a wider audience. When Rashmika said yes to this, I was so happy. But I will never serve greed at the cost of cinematic integrity. When I'm writing characters, I have a clear sense of what kind of eyes I want my actors to have. With Bhooma, a lot of the struggle is internal, so I needed a woman with extremely transparent eyes. I call Rashmika "headlight eyes". She just flew with Bhooma, and I'm just so proud of her. 

How was it working with her, especially in those emotionally charged scenes?

I have a natural style of working with actors, and Rashmika has a natural style in which she'd like to be directed by someone, and it was a perfect fit. She loved being talked to about the beats of the scenes. She'd just absorb everything so well, and when she'd give me a take, everything I told her would be in it. It was incredible. 

I'm sure most women who watched the film felt seen in some capacity. Did you feel this energy with the women on set, too?

One of the things I'd keep hearing on the set from the women I was working with was, 'I had no idea how you got it as a man.' Rashmika would keep telling me that 'I'm doing this film because it is my warm hug to all the women out there. I know how many people are going through this in varying degrees.' And I wanted this film to make all the Vikrams make an effort to be better with the women around them. 

How was it for you to write Vikram, because in a lot of films, we've seen this sort of behaviour be celebrated and glorified.

It stems from intention. I know the things that get claps and whistles, and I knew that was the tightrope I was walking. The intention was to show them the same thing and make people uncomfortable rather than whistle. So I didn't want people to clap for him. I made sure I didn't give him any serious redeeming qualities, which would then become an easy crutch for certain sections of audiences to start empathising too much with him. 

The other important choice that I made is the creative cop out in my head, which is how much of a Virgin Mary I wrote Bhooma like. To get that section of the audience to side with Bhooma and make them feel her discomfort, I had to write her this way. If this story happened to a Durga instead of a Bhooma, it would be just as valid, and it is just as scary and wrong. I wanted to make people first slowly align with Bhooma and then clap when she finally becomes a Durga. 

Tell us about the choice of not having Bhooma reveal the reason for the breakup. Vikram believes she broke up with him because of his backlogs…

I knew that there were going to be people like Vikram, who were going to hang on just to the backlog issue. When two people part ways, you always tend to hang on to the only angle in the scenario that makes you the victim and the other person a villain. Bhooma is going through many things during the scene because her dad has just left her, and here this guy wants to marry her. 

She could've told him that she doesn't want to become like his mother. But that is the dignity of Bhooma. She knows that she has some share of blame in allowing this relationship to happen because she couldn't speak up when she should have or stand up for herself. So she just tells him she's not happy. She also knows that he doesn't have the emotional maturity to process why she doesn't want to become like his mum. She's not ready for the drama.