Baby Movie Review: A Morally Ambiguous Drama That Thrives In The Flaws Of Its Characters

Director: Sai Rajesh

Cast: Anand Deverakonda, Vaishnavi Chaitanya, Viraj Ashwin

Mild spoilers ahead...

It's quite easy to write off Baby as a shallow, biased drama punctuated with the male gaze early on. And the film does lend itself to such scrutiny in the early portions. Take, for instance, the scene where Anand (Anand Deverakonda) lashes out at his school sweetheart Vaishnavi (Vaishnavi Chaitanya) when she expresses her desire to join her new college friends for a ladies' night in a pub. This confrontation, the first one between the couple, occurs right after Vaishnavi undergoes a physical make-over from being a modest, dark-skinned basti (slum) girl to a sophisticated, urban lady, encouraged by her equally posh and rich friends at her engineering college. 

An agitated Anand, who clearly reprimands Vaishnavi's wish, citing that her friends are a bad influence, almost threatens to slap her with his shoe. In this situation, he doesn't even try to understand her perspective, which is coming from a place of excitement to explore a world and experiences she hasn't been privy to over the years. Now, it's easy to label Anand a control freak for being so indifferent to her wishes, although he believes that his momentary anger is purely a reflection of his concern for the love of his life. But where Baby actually undoes its mistake of letting Anand's toxic traits pass off as care--even though he apologises for it--is by making Vaishnavi address his entitlement and controlling nature later in the film.

If you feel something's problematic in Baby, it's likely that the film will address it through a character. This allows the film to undo a lot of choices that might come across as inappropriate early on in the film. And yes, there's a lot of inappropriate stuff on display because the characters themselves are flawed and toxic.

The three main characters, Anand, Vaishnavi, and Viraj, are imperfect beings driven by mad love with their every mistake, regardless of how good their intention might be, making the plot thicker and murkier. Although the early, sweet school sequence that tracks the origins of Anand and Vaishnavi's love story makes you wish the couple gets a 'happily ever after' ending, even though you know it's not going to be an easy road, the film makes it particularly hard to pick a side. The beauty of Baby is that nothing exists in simple black and white, everything is grey. Be it Anand, Vaishnavi, or Viraj, Sai Rajesh's writing lets you see through their personalities. We know that Anand is a control freak, but we also know that he cares for Vaishnavi. We are also aware that Vaishnav loves gifts, cars, and the 'rich' stuff. Anand seeking physical intimacy, a 'kiss' from Vaishnavi, is a recurring point in the film, but when Vaishnavi agrees to it (you have to check out the film to know why she agrees), he steps back because he believes she is too innocent to be intimate with him. This might be played for laughs in the film, to juxtapose his 'character' with Vaishnavi's, but you see this man's intent. He's the same guy who assassinated her character and broke her heart by spewing some of the nastiest things earlier. You see, Baby urges that people, at least its main characters, can be many things and doesn't compartmentalise them morally.

Likewise, Vaishnavi, who is central to the film, is forced to make many difficult choices in the film that affect Anand, her childhood sweetheart Anand and the college hunk Viraj, who comes across as an underwritten but interesting character nevertheless. While it begins as a familiar love triangle, the whole Viraj-Vaishnavi angle is dealt with in a super interesting way that never judges Vaishnavi. She keeps asserting that she would like to keep their relationship purely platonic while he relentlessly keeps pursuing her romantically. Viraj eventually puts Vaishnavi in a spot where she has to do something so 'unfaithful' against her wish; he does it by threatening her, meaning that he is not a 'good' person. But later on, we see Viraj pining for Vaishnavi, even after causing her great sorrow and turning her life upside down. That's only the tip of the iceberg.

The interpersonal dynamics in this film are super tricky, rendering the screenplay feel convoluted at times. But it is precisely this inconsistency, which is an extension of the volatile, mercurial characters, that makes Baby what it is. But I wish the writing gave Viraj the same depth it gave to Anand and Vaishnavi. His actions lack a motive and feel forced, although their consequences are registered strongly. Similarly, the characters of Baby are always subject to change, and trust me, the graph of these characters and the scenarios that precipitate a change in their arcs and the story justify its 177-minute-long runtime, although the plainness of the first half argues otherwise.

There are some brilliant writing choices here. It is a film of echoes. One narrative-defining incident takes place on Viraj's birthday, while another one happens on Anand's birthday. A knife draws parallels between Viraj and Anand at a point when they are consumed by rage and despair. Anand's words about the value he gives to Vaishnavi are echoed by Viraj when he proposes to her. An iPhone, too, becomes a tool to demarcate Viraj and Anand from Vaishnavi's perspective. Anand, a Trivikram fan, keeps framing rhythmic dialogues to express his love for Vaishnavi throughout the film, but his best expression comes when he is utterly shattered.

Moral ambiguity, however, is a trait reserved only for the leads. The weakest and the most annoying writing choice has to be the presence of an external antagonist named Sita a caricaturish representation of a spoilt girl. She just exists as a personification of a bad influence on Vaishnavi in college. While we understand that the leads, despite their glaring flaws, are doing some problematic things for the sake of love, Sita's actions and existence are so one-dimensional that the writing becomes painfully bland whenever she is used to incite or accelerate a conflict. And she is used only for either of these. The play featuring just the main trio is so solid that the inclusion of an external antagonist only deters the intricacy of the drama.

Moreover, I wish the film had better staging because its emphasis on dialogue makes most of the scenes, from a visual standpoint, look purely functional. I understand that Baby is a conversational drama, but better staging would have exalted Baby to the next level. A scene featuring Anand and Viraj in an auto in the pre-climax is perhaps the only scene in the film that makes effective usage of staging. The rest of the film will work equally well even as an audiobook because the entire focus is on conversations.

Speaking of the movie-viewing experience Baby offers, Vijay Bulganin is undoubtedly the strongest pillar of Baby, and his music accentuates the drama wonderfully. While 'O Rendu Prema Meghalila' is the soul of the film, breathing life into even tiny moments, the 'Premisthunna' song sequence, ascribed to the innate drama in it, might just be one of the most discomforting sequences in a long time. Baby does get into some dark spaces.

Another significant quality of Baby is how it treats its characters like simple human beings for whom concepts like first love, sex, and moving on are a big deal. If anything, Baby is an antithesis to the idea of moving on. A completely dejected Anand admits that he is a simple auto driver, and this is how his thought process is. His monologue at the end of the film, in a way, invalidates our insistence on a more progressive story because Baby makes it a point to establish that it's telling the story of simple, flawed people who are not necessarily acquainted with the progressive ideas that many discuss on Twitter. And problematising their personalities, especially Anand's, ain't going to serve the cause because Baby acknowledges the characters' issues; whether you sympathise with them or not might is a subjective choice. Like with every film, your response to Baby is going to be heavily dependent on your worldview and personal experience. With Baby, these factors might matter a little bit more while evaluating it because such is the nature of the story. And that's exactly why Baby earns the title of being the most interesting, ambiguous, and debatable Telugu film of the year so far.