Big Girls Don’t Cry Review — Sucharita Tyagi
A movie and a show about the life of girls in a hostel set in the hills, somewhere in north India. The movie titled Girls Will Be Girls, and the show is named Big Girls Don’t Cry.
Movie baat hum kar chuke hain, my Sundance review I’ll link the description. Come let’s get into the show.
The first time I heard this phrase was probably when Ms. Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas fame released a solo album, and sang these lines laying atop a very sexy Milo Ventimiglia. So very different from the Fergie I knew from London Bridge, My Humps, or the one I diligently learned the lyrics to, Shut It Up just shut up, this song taught my mid-teen brain that people can be two different things, and that my feelings of sadness and loneliness were just as valid as the teenage rebellion bubbling inside me. I just have to not let myself be CONSUMED by them.
This clarity came much later as an adult when I had the vocabulary to mentally explain all of this to myself. But ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’ became a mantra for me. Recently it has been replaced by “Fear Is The Mind Killer” as I adapt the Bene Geserit way of life, but that’s another story.
To see a WHOLE new group of young ones use the line I did at their age, was an exciting prospect. What does this term mean now? Will it make me cringe at my own naivety, as memories come flooding back or will it provide an insight into how language, terminology, and context evolve with each generation?
Big Girls Don’t Cry, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, attempts to do the latter, but in its enthusiasm to talk about everything, ends up saying nothing at all.
Divided over seven 7 episodes, BGDC, an annoying mouthful of an acronym, has not one, but 7 or 8 protagonists, which is ambitious but unfortunately entirely too many. We are plonked in the middle of the prestigious Vandana Valley Boarding School for girls, set in the hills, and the promise is, that in this school of rich kids, we’ll get the perspective of an outsider via the new student, the scholarship kid Kavya. Partly due to her small stature, partly due to the awareness that her parents aren’t rich, Kavya tries not to draw attention to herself, which makes for a wonderful protagonist, someone through whom you observe and tie things together, from 5 steps away. Kavya though can’t help but be noticed owing to her brilliance in sports and academics. Soon the BGDC gang sees her potential and adds her to the group, for a series of adventures.
Unfortunately, though, almost instantly the screenplay then decides to completely abandon this central plotline, and develop indulgent character arcs for the rest of the actors, most of whom are given to melodramatic histrionics, highlighting the gaps in the writing just that much more, also unfortunately. Noor is the teacher’s pet head girl type, all you get to know about Pluggy is that she failed 2 times and is now looking to get laid, Ludo plays basketball and maybe is gay, JC is a princess from Nepal I think, the characteristic Roo gets is, “loud and annoying”. Actors Avantika, Vidushi, and Lhakyila stand out in their performances, the latter two working impressively well with the material, bringing a freshness to a very predictable narrative.
The missed opportunity here is tragic. Long stories about girls away from the conditions of their homes, while having to follow the commandments of an institution that exists to beat the individuality out of them, is an exciting, frankly novel space to explore, and I do suspect that IS the intent of the creator Nitya Mehra. But because the editing and piecing together of the screenplay is given to HEAVILY underlining what it’s doing, like Karan Boolani’s Thank You For Coming, the show gets too caught in WHY it wants to tell these stories (because these stories aren’t told enough), forgetting to focus on the HOW.
In one particularly vexing sequence, “Pluggy” gets lost after a hiking while on a camping trip, and ends up finding her way back to the camp owner’s house. A sudden Dolly Ahluwalia is sitting in her living room, decked up in full pahadi jewelry, and before she’s even had a chance to accurately figure out who this lost child is and what must one do when a girl wanders into your home in the middle of the night, a dialogue dump about “Duniya mein joh log fit nahi hote woh paagal hote hain. Pyaar dhoondho joh tumhe apne se bada banaaye” reduces the whole potentially promising and funny bit, to simplistic caricaturing.
The attempts to address prevalent casteism and classism in prestigious academic institutions exist but are feeble, these themes are underdeveloped and overshadowed by the show’s other shortcomings. While one is glad there is a female gaze here for the most part, the show’s desire for activism is unsubtle and as a result formulaic and dull. The attempts to navigate the tumultuous world of teenage angst and self-discovery ultimately falls flat in its hurried execution, i suspect I even caught stock music used as underlay in a few scenes. Things begin to come together in episode 6, when perhaps a new conflict, begins to take shape, but by that time its too late. In the earlier episodes, the stakes fluctuate so much, and pivotal moments are so devoid of emotional impact, that despite occasional glimpses of authenticity in depicting teenage struggles, the series fails to move beyond types and superficial desires.
The show is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
So, on a scale of 1 to 10, Big Girls Don’t Cry is……3rd episode mein the first actual cliffhanger shows up at the end. AFTER you’ve consumed nearly 3 hours of story!
