If you’ve ever heard someone say “All women are like this only,” followed by agreeing nods and laughter that made you uncomfortable, this film is not for you. Writer and director Sai Rajesh’s Baby tells the love story of a young couple, Vaishnavi (played by an impeccable Vaishnavi Chaitanya) and Anand (Anand Deverakonda), who live in a low-income neighbourhood in Hyderabad. After completing their schooling, Anand starts to drive an auto for a living while Vaishnavi goes on to study at an elite engineering college, where she makes upper-class friends and adapts to a more upscale lifestyle. This creates a rift between Vaishnavi and Anand, widened further when an affluent classmate Viraj (Viraj Ashwin) enters her life.
Appalling videos of public reactions went viral soon after the movie was released, with many male viewers remarking that women should ‘learn’ from this movie how not to be. Some even called Vaishnavi’s character a ‘whore’, echoing Anand’s words from the film, while others said she should’ve been killed in the movie for her actions. While Baby tries to explore the moral ambiguities of each protagonist through their choices and actions, it simply cannot be viewed in a vacuum, removed from the realities and attitudes of a patriarchal society. Perhaps inadvertently then, the film ends up coming across as a ‘cautionary tale’ about the ‘perils’ of allowing ‘too much freedom’ to women. A few viewers have defended the film saying it is not actively misogynistic in Vaishnavi’s portrayal, and that this is just how audiences have responded to an otherwise ambiguous story, but I’d like to disagree. Here, I run through the film to highlight some of the ways in which it lets women down. Stop reading here if you’d like to avoid spoilers.
SPOILERS AHEAD, FILM’S ENDING DISCUSSED
In Baby, Vaishnavi and Anand are neighbours and classmates at school. The first section of the film has a charming meet-cute that sets up this young couple’s love story. Anand becomes an auto driver after failing the Class 10 board exams, as his single mother with a speech disability is unable to pay for his education any longer. Vaishnavi goes on to study engineering in a big elite college thanks to her mother going to great lengths to buy her a seat.
Vaishnavi is equal parts excited and nervous about the journey ahead, but is also worried that she might grow distant from Anand. But soon, she starts to adapt to the new world, where her new friends introduce her to new experiences and try to get her to fit into their lives by changing her skin colour, hairstyle and clothes. In an interview with The Hindu, when Anand Deverakonda was asked about the criticism over the film’s trailer which seemed to equate white shades of skin colour to aspirational beauty standards, he urged people to judge the film after watching it. Now that I have watched it, I still wonder why Vaishnavi had to be shown with a brown skin tone in the beginning, and why she had to make her skin whiter to be accepted as one among the rich, fashionable students in her college.
After lengthy, stereotypical sequences that show Vaishnavi wearing short clothes, drinking at pubs and seemingly ‘losing touch with her reality’ to the extent that she wants to completely hide her past life from her new friends, we finally arrive at the point where the film becomes a love triangle. Viraj (Viraj Ashwin), her new best friend in college, serenades her with compliments and gifts that Anand can never match up to. Anand finds it difficult to accept these changes in her life.
The film from here on deals with the many disappointments that Anand and Vaishnavi go through in their relationship. While Anand is supportive enough to regularly drop Vaishnavi at her college in his auto, he struggles with accepting the way she starts to change. Vaishnavi on the other hand is too busy happily acclimatising to her new life to notice what Anand is going through. The plot takes a turn when these differences culminate in a big fight, and Vaishnavi gets back at Anand by kissing Viraj. This moment, portrayed as Vaishnavi ‘losing her moral compass’, leads to havoc in all three protagonists’ lives.
When Vaishnavi tells Viraj that it meant nothing and asks him to move on, he falls into an alcohol-induced downward spiral and she makes it her job to fix it — only to eventually find out that he had someone film them kissing earlier. Viraj threatens to leak the video unless she agrees to marry him.
In this moment of dire confusion, she turns to her friend Sita, who was responsible for her makeover, and the solution they come up with is that Vaishnavi only needs to sleep with Viraj once, because that is all he wants. Sita, however, was only taking advantage of Vaishnavi’s vulnerability right from day one. The relationship between Sita and Vaishnavi was simply heartbreaking for me to watch. After decades of making progress to reach a space where we see women support each other on screen and not as each other’s enemies, Baby undoes it all, the Bechdel test be damned. Sita’s character also parrots extremely classist dialogues throughout the film, coming across as a one-dimensional character with no clear motive.
While much of the hate directed against Vaishnavi’s character from male viewers seems to stem from the fact that she has sex with Viraj while still dating Anand, the fact that this was a coercive act that happened without her active consent seems to have escaped these viewers. Many viewers seem unable to empathise with Vaishnavi’s distress here, instead seeing it as a deliberate act of malicious adultery against Anand. The film’s writing, too, doesn’t really lead viewers to empathise with her too along with Anand.
After rather long and winding closing scenes, the only redemption for the film is that Vaishnavi doesn’t end up with either of the men. But not before she gives it her all to make things right with Anand again. She only walks away when he threatens to kill himself. The film counts on the audience to feel sorry for the men. They can say terrible, unkind, condescending things to a woman but are given a medal for eventually realising that they were wrong to say them. Unlike Arjun Reddy (from Anand’s brother Vijay Deverakonda’s 2017 film of the same name), neither of them is violent and conceited. They’re shown as otherwise endearing boys who will go to any lengths to keep the woman they love happy. (However, when they find out all that she has hidden from them, their reaction is to show up at her doorstep with a knife. Go figure!)
Love is messy and imperfect on most days. Relationships are difficult work requiring constant support between partners but even then, they’re hardly ever ideal. They may not always conform to our understanding of modern-day gender politics. But that doesn’t make stories like Baby any less real. It’s not wrong to make such films, but it’s important to not make heroes out of toxic, abusive men. Whether the film set out to do this or not, that’s what many male viewers seem to be taking away from it.
Hours after I saw the film in a packed theatre, I was unable to shake off the discomfort I felt during some scenes where the protagonists enact deep misogyny, only for the mostly male audiences to whistle and cheer them on. The scene where Anand calls Vaishnavi a ‘whore’ for instance. Even if the filmmakers argue that they were merely showing us the behaviour of flawed, real men in our society, many viewers appear to have resonated with Anand’s character while vilifying Vaishnavi and other young women like her on his behalf. Whether willingly or otherwise, the writing and direction of the film definitely lead viewers to these ‘high points’ and continue to invoke misogynistic responses from them.
The videos of public reactions during screenings and outside theatres show many male viewers slut shaming Vaishnavi, and speak of Baby as a ‘lesson’ for all the women who wear short clothes and party in pubs, essentially average young women figuring out adolescence and adult life in modern, urban India, some of them with aspirations of class mobility. While the filmmakers may claim that they did not anticipate such paternalistic responses, they seem obvious and predictable to an average Telugu filmgoer who has seen the way young men have received films like Arjun Reddy and RX 100 in the past. Yet, these reactions sent shivers down my spine.
Although chastised by the public, the film itself doesn’t point at Vaishnavi as the outright ‘villain’. It shows her as a woman who will talk back to every man who abuses or belittles her, but will also be accommodating and submissive at times to seek their validation. Yet, while the writing seems to place Vaishnavi in the driver’s seat, since it is her actions that drive the plot, it comes across as a false sense of agency. Ultimately, the viewers seem to end up caring more about Anand’s feelings, and the film too guides viewers to empathise strongly with him.
At best, Baby is a story of sugar-coated patriarchy and at worst, it is an ‘advisory’ against the havoc apparently wreaked when a woman aspires to live outside the boundaries drawn by those who dictate her life.
One of the times Vaishnavi is giving Anand a piece of her mind, she says, “Every time a man has to swear at a woman, he can call us a whore and walk away. But if I want to swear at a man, I have to call him a whore’s son. I can’t even insult you without insulting another woman first.” This dialogue is the only thing I will be taking away from the nearly three-hour-long ego trip for men.