As a busy college student, I find it hard to make time for myself to sit down and watch something. However, when I heard my fellow Canadian and Never Have I Ever’s Maitreyi Ramakrishnan was in a new movie about competitive college dancing, I knew this was a film I could not miss.Â
Best of the Best is about two college freshmen and lifelong best friends who sign up for a competitive Bollywood dance team at UCLA. Yes, it is basically Pitch Perfect with a South Asian cast. And no, it probably will not be as iconic as Pitch Perfect, but that’s not the point. The point is that it’s representation. Something that feels increasingly more difficult to come by these days.Â
As a Bangladeshi-Canadian woman, I often find myself balancing between two identities. As a teenager, I found myself clinging to characters that resembled my personality traits like Andie in Pretty in Pink or Lara Jean in To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. But these were never true representations to my personal experiences growing up South Asian. Enter Devi Vishwakumar. Though we didn’t have the exact same backgrounds, there wasn’t a single character on television I could relate to more at the time. I was angry; I embarrassed myself; I had the internal resentment of being brown. Why am I like this? Why are my parents so embarrassing? Why must I stick to these cultural values that no one else has? Devi helped me better understand who I was as a person and made me feel comfortable in my identity. To me, that’s what representation is really about. Â
At a time of rampant racism against South Asians in North America, Best of the Best is not only good representation, it’s needed representation. It’s not typical that dance styles from the South Asian sub-continent are represented in an appreciative way in Hollywood. Even this film tries to break out of the constructs in which Bollywood puts itself (that is, marriage being the most important aspect of our culture). More importantly, this might be the first film I’ve ever watched with a largely South Asian cast that takes place in America. I had never thought that was ever a possibility, but now here it is, giving me hope for more.
The writers, Hasan Minhaj and Prashanth Venkataramanujam, hit the nail on the head in the feelings of growing up brown. There was one point in the film where one of the main characters, Anjali, was looking through old photos and videos of her and her best friend, Maya, where Maya was portrayed as the ugly one of the two. Although Maitreyi Ramakrishnan is objectively gorgeous, I think this speaks to the larger colorism and portrayal of beauty standards both within the South Asian community and outside it. She is a Tamil girl with darker skin and does not match the typical Bollywood beauty standards. Similarly, I grew up never feeling beautiful, whether that be because of the extra hair on my body, because I was short, or because I thought my skin was too dark. I, like Maya, had a gorgeous best friend who was considered the pretty one and nothing made me feel uglier. Maybe, if I had a film like this growing up, I would have felt seen, and all of these horrible feelings I felt as a kid would dissolve a little. Instead, I grew up with the rhetoric that brown people are weird, ugly, and virtually undesirable.Â
As someone studying film myself, my goal is what this film started to do: accurate representation of South Asians by South Asians. It’s hard to not think of a time when my experiences or criticisms were shut down. And even though it’s not explicitly because of my identity, well, a girl can take a hint. But even if Best of the Best is formulaic and not the most profound film ever made, it was something they had to take a chance on. The more opportunities we get, the more likely we are to get representation of all the identities in that huge sub-continent. We are not a monolith, but how will people know if they never get to see that? We need to break out of Bollywood and set aside the films of Mira Nair and Gurinder Chadha, and for my fellow film bros, Satyajit Ray. These are important and foundational but dated. It’s time to let the new generation of filmmakers through that golden door of opportunity and finally prove that we are the best of the best.Â