By Zenisha Gonsalves
The film is a coming-of-age story that follows Laila – a Delhi college student who has cerebral palsy – to New York and back. Amidst attending classes and hanging out with friends, she falls in love, navigates cities, has sex, faces tragedy, and grows into an independent woman.
There are several conversations between women in the movie that have nothing to do with men, but here are a few examples. Laila (played by Kalki Koechlin) and her mother Shubhangini (whom she calls Aai, played by Revathi) talk about how she’s going to go to NYU, and even tell the father, “We’re going, you can stay here” (and he does). Later, Laila and her lover Khanum (played by Sayani Gupta) talk about how Khanum came out to her parents, and what would happen if Laila came out to hers. And Laila and her mother talk to the woman they have employed at NYU to help Laila bathe and dress.
Margarita, With a Straw successfully does what most movies won’t even attempt to do – it leaves its characters alone. Even within Laila’s family, the film allows you to experience each character as a person, not a type, by refraining from creating overbearing, done-to-death family dynamics. There is no aggressive father, no over-achieving sibling, no timid mother who is trying to keep the peace from the kitchen.
Laila’s mother is determined that her daughter will not be held back by her movement disorder. When Laila receives her acceptance letter from NYU, her father begins to say something about how Delhi University has good courses. Aai cuts him off and tells her, “Udhar mat dekh. Tumhe jaana hain?” In Delhi, she follows Laila into the college campus, watching as her daughter doesn’t go to class, and holds her when Laila sobs in the garden, when a boy she likes doesn’t respond to her overtures, “He doesn’t love me, I don’t want to go to college.” Aai also travels with Laila to New York, to settle her in. When they do fight, the tension between mother and daughter brings you back to when you were 14 years old and slammed doors so hard that your mother threatened to take them off their hinges.
The only character the audience is never really given a chance to like is Khanum, Laila’s visually impaired Pakistani-Bangladeshi girlfriend. We see Khanum swimming, playing miniature golf, and playing cricket with the kids in Laila’s neighbourhood. There is something frantic about Khanum’s character that never lets you actually get to know her. Even the story she tells Laila about how she came out to her parents is a textbook one, and you can’t help feeling like Khanum isn’t able to tell her own stories yet. Juxtaposed, Laila and Khanum feel a little like “Did you choose average or beautiful?” and increasingly you begin to wish that Khanum had chosen average, and that somehow, that might have made her more real.
Often, Laila is able to navigate relationships and deal with people because she is neither made out to be fantastic, nor pitiable. At a rock band competition, the woman handing out the first prize to Laila’s college explains that it was given to them because the lyrics were written by a girl with a disability. Laila takes in what she is saying, then flips her off and moves offstage. Much later in the movie, when Laila tells Khanum that she cheated on her, and Khanum asks, “Were you just using me? Did you just need someone to take care of you?” you are simultaneously upset with Khanum for suggesting something like that, but you also wonder whether there’s any truth to what she’s saying – the explanation that Laila offers about not wanting to have any secrets seems at best an attempt at sincerity. But you also realise that if there’s any truth to Khanum’s words, Laila is hardly the first young person to be in a relationship out of need.
It’s true that if you ask yourself what the movie is about if Laila didn’t have cerebral palsy, you are left with a story of a college girl who has crushes, writes, masturbates, is caring, and sometimes selfish, and very ordinary. But this is exactly why the movie works, and the few attempts to create a palpable plotline seem paranoid. Margarita, With a Straw does two things well – it lets you into the everyday life of a young woman in a way that has rarely been done (and this is largely due to the fact that Laila is just allowed to live her life, instead of the character being used to satisfy a plot), and it lets you into the everyday life of a person who has cerebral palsy – one who is neither heroine nor victim.
Zenisha Gonsalves is an intern at The Ladies Finger and a student at St. Joseph’s College of Arts & Sciences, Bangalore.