Big Girls Don’t Cry Review: Youth Drama is a Bit Too Long

– No Spoilers –

Big Girls Don’t Cry, or #BGDC, is a rather odd cookie. It’s not unrelatable, because it is, and its stories, even though, interesting and sometimes fun, feel like it would’ve been better as a movie. The thing is, we have been bombarded with movies and shows these days that focus on the problems of youngsters, and their varied needs including the necessity to break free from all the shackles of life.

Which is well and good, but historically speaking, teenagers aren’t the best people to understand how their actions have consequences and when we are asked to follow a bunch of spoilt brats who have no idea about how horrible the real world is, it gets difficult to feel for their needs sometimes.

So, the series starts with scholarship kid Kavya Yadav, whose dreams of making it big soon get a bit quashed when she meets a group of well-meaning but absolute brats. Her newfound friendship is cool and exciting, as they always are, and considering these girls come from affluent families, that’s all the more reason to celebrate. However, as I mentioned previously, consequences are not something that teenagers understand much and thus, soon, things get really messy for everyone.

Of course, we have Vandana Valley Girls School, headed by the very hot-headed Anita Varma (Pooja Bhatt) who doesn’t know where to stop with her rules and her bunch of lackeys who are equally as inflexible. Now, women who have studied in all-girls schools will find themselves relating to the strictness, the feeling of losing their identity and the schools behaving as if they are setting us up to be ideal wives – these things never change. Plus, the girls are mostly sweet and blissfully oblivious, which is also quite relatable. Standing up for themselves and for what they deem to be right, regardless of the consequences, is something that one can always learn from the youth.

And with that, we find ourselves a little lost within the mix of this series. Big Girls Don’t Cry is relatable, moving and quite fun when things are going great. However, for most of its runtime, I had a distinct feeling that this should’ve been a movie – there’s just so much happening here that could’ve been condensed to fit in a shorter runtime. And even with this huge runtime, we don’t get a conclusive ending – it’s an odd open-ended mess that makes you question your sanity about whether or not you’re looking too deep into things. I still don’t know and I can still feel Arjun Mathur’s twinkling eyes on me as if he’s plotting my demise.

I digress.

The plot takes so long to create elaborate stories for so many girls that at one point you question who is the protagonist. The series included every other character trope in its storyline and made things inclusive with a gay romance, so much so that everyone felt like they needed a bit more attention. It is also difficult to actually root for any of these girls because all of them are brats and are quite brazen with their thoughtless actions. It’s difficult to relate to them in these moments as well because they behave in the stereotypical “rich” way that doesn’t give their characters depth.

The problem is, after going through so many hurdles over 6 long episodes, the last episode feels like a cop-out because things start to fall into place one after another for every character. People conveniently forgive and forget, and things work out suddenly for characters who have been working over the last few episodes for something with a simple conversation and probably a prayer. The convenient conclusion has no emotion or depth, feels undeserved and totally sours the experience of watching the show.

Big Girls Don’t Cry Review: Conclusion

All said and done, our gang of girls are sweet, messy and relatable. Although the storyline is too long and sometimes feels a little convoluted, it’s definitely a show that will touch your heart. It’s the last episode I truly have an issue with because it doesn’t bring the entire series to a believable and fruitful conclusion and feels like forces things to end the ordeal for everyone. Either way, the young actors do a great job with their complicated characters and do justice rather thoroughly.

Big Girls Don’t Cry or #BGDC is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

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