Margarita with a Straw

**Summary: 6/10: a genuinely brave premise undone by a director unwilling to cast the authenticity her story demanded.**


A few movies dare to ask a question so rarely posed on screen that the asking itself feels like an act of courage. *Margarita With a Straw* wants to follow a young woman with cerebral palsy through the messy, hungry, hormonal business of growing up, through the desire, rejection, queerness, and the particular impatience of a mind that has never been given permission to want things out loud. That ambition deserves real credit. Disability on screen is so often reduced to inspiration or tragedy. Shonali Bose's film at least tries for something closer to the truth, a woman who is horny and funny and timid and brave in roughly the same proportions as anyone else her age.

Kalki Koechlin, as Laila, commits fully to the physical demands of the role, and the supporting cast, particularly Revathi as her mother and Sayani Gupta as her lover, bring real warmth and specificity to a script that doesn't always deserve them. Koechlin's performance has been celebrated, including with a National Award, and I understand why; there's commitment here, and real intelligence in how she approaches Laila's rage and appetite. But commitment is not the same as truth. Watch closely and you might see the tattles in the fine muscles of the face. She is clearly a healthy young woman performing disability. It's a subtle untruth, but it accumulates, and it kept pulling me out of a film that otherwise wanted me fully inside Laila's head.

Which raises the question the film never adequately answers: why didn't Bose cast an actress who actually has cerebral palsy? India produces something close to a feature film a day; the idea that the Indian film industry didn't have a disabled actress capable of carrying this role borders on ludicrous. And even granting, generously, that no trained actress with CP existed, any truly serious director can build a performance from a non-actor with otherwise good bones. Javier Fesser did exactly this with *Campeones* (2018), casting performers with real developmental disabilities and shaping something that felt lived-in rather than studied. Issa López did something structurally similar, if somewhat darker, in *Tigers Are Not Afraid* (2017), pulling a cast of children who'd never acted before into performances of real anguish and tenderness. Authenticity, in both cases, wasn't a limitation directors worked around; it was the foundation they built on.

There's a second, stranger failure of nerve sitting right alongside the first. Koechlin, of French parentage, is visually distinct from the Indian family the film places her in, and the script never once acknowledges it, not through adoption, not through any other explanation. A film that wants to be about belonging and becoming, can not just drop this fault on the audience and forget about it. That particular silence reads, sadly, like a director who never noticed the dissonance she put on screen.

None of Bose's errors erases what works. The film's frankness about disabled sexuality remains genuinely rare, and its refusal to smooth Laila into something palatable or saintly is, on its own terms, a small act of rebellion. But bravery of concept isn't the same as rigor of execution, and *Margarita With a Straw* keeps choosing the easier path at exactly the moments it should have pushed harder, toward the actress who could have made this undeniable instead of merely admirable.