Good Bad Girl Review: A whole lot of fun
Good Bad Girl Review: A whole lot of fun
In a scene from SonyLiv’s Good Bad Girl, Maya played by Samridhi Dewan, accuses a woman of punching her in her cancer-infected breast. “Cancer Bitch!” Maya declares, angrily, but also callously after the altercation blooms into an inquest about her hidden, but obviously exaggerated situation. This is an underdog story told from the perspective of rare bullishness about morality and its many inconveniences. “Mujhe jhooth bolna acha lagta hai”, Maya explains at one point, as the reason behind wanting to pursue law. Good Bad Girl as the name suggests, is a series that plays fast and loose with the implications of honesty as a principle and as a tool. Should one be honest to what is demanded of them or should one be honest to the reality you have been handed? It’s a question that is subtly, and entertainingly examined through a series that though it can be hit and miss on its comedic notes, is frequently, entertaining.
Good Bad Girl is the story of Maya, an ambitious young woman who believes that in the face of opportunity all lies are subject to the fairness of the truth. Maya is a lawyer in a relatively moneyed but also struggling law firm. She notices a lump on her breast, which could or could not be cancer. More than the horror of the former, it’s the notorious but liberating agency of the latter that she chooses to focus on. It won’t be giving anything away to say, Maya lies that she has cancer. One lie turns into many in what is also a meticulously crafted comment on class. One person’s impediment might be another’s last hope at dignity. Maya finds love, respect and naked opportunity in the tragic role that she chooses to play.
The show frequents to her past where a young Maya trains herself in the art of lying. Art because lying, she explains, is subjective to the condition it serves. Lying about your lack of privilege, in this case, is possibly the same as lying about your inherited agency. It’s a neat little dilemma, but never quite assembled as a discussable contradiction. For example, Maya’s father in one scene suggests she can fake having taken a flight to get to a college (using an airline tag) full of entitled teenagers. The same father is then horrified by the discovery that his daughter makes money selling virtual sexual favours to strangers. That complexity of intent vs initiation is never quite confronted.
There are plenty of things to like about Good Bad Girl. A litany of side characters is frequently hilarious, even dark in the competitive edge they bring to the protagonist’s suffering. Vaibhav Raj Gupta is an able, and often grimly delightful adversary to Maya’s aspirations. Gul Panag, as the reluctant boss of both, is a delight in herself. But the highlight of the series is Dewan, perfectly cast as the manipulative but also soft-looking outsider who continues to punch against the grain, at times at the cost of her own sanity. Maya can appear evil at times for lusting after the obvious, but she is also humanised here with a touch of inherited trauma. Blind pursuits make you lonely, and Maya suffers from complexes that go well beyond the desire to fit into a certain borrowed milieu. A throwback scene where she chooses a sophisticated play over a mainstream film is a frighteningly accurate insight into the kind of conformation most underprivileged kids fall victim to when they cross the gates of famous institutions.
Not everything about the series is finely tuned though. Maya’s life and career, can at times, become incidental even though law is teased as the very profession that urges her to lie and cheat. Also, the flashbacks can after a point begin to eat into present-day Maya’s unabashed approach to life. It would have been braver, maybe, to just let her occupy the edge rather than mellow it every now and then with a sobering revisit to a difficult moment. The long journey to a consequential event of sorts is built gradually, but not without tonal inconsistencies between Maya’s life and the one she yearns for.
Good Bad Girl can hit a few false notes but it is a whole lot of fun. Maya’s undefined relationship with her doctor, is quietly revelatory in the way our stories have begun to travel beyond the obviation of attraction. Dewan is incredible, as a resilient but ultimately flawed woman who takes her own time to re-think the repercussions of her actions. She is cocky, a bit of a spiteful underdog whose pettiness is what makes her charming, maybe even hesitantly, relatable. This show packs in entertainment sans to a large extent, the incumbent frivolity.
Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.
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