If Life Gives You Limes, Make Margaritas: Praise for “Margarita, With a Straw”
Kalki Koechlin in Margarita, With a Straw (2014) portrays a queer woman with Cerebral Palsy and her journey with self-discovery while she bounces between her home in Dehli, India, and her time at NYU.
Laila (Kalki Koechlin) arrives in New York City with a full scholarship to NYU and a yearning for sex.
After a semester in India at Delhi University goes awry (in part due to Laila’s infatuation with the lead singer of a band she writes music for), Laila rises to the occasion at the opportunity to attend New York University in the fall. Her family stays parked in their middle-class neighborhood in India, save for her mother, Shubhangini (Revathi) who makes the trip to NYC with her. Laila spends most of her time exploring her own autonomy in the US as well as the anatomy of a couple of NYU college students that catch her eye. In doing so, she connects with her Creative Writing partner, Jared (William Moseley), and her first girlfriend, Khanum, (Sayini Gupta) along the way. All the while, she gets her wheelchair caught in the snow, drinks a Margarita for the first time, cracks eggs all over the table, and gets caught watching porn on her laptop.
Director Shonali Bose navigates Laila’s story with responsible, thought-provoking ease. Laila’s tale is one of independence and a little defiance — not of her struggles with Cerebral Palsy, though Bose does shoot us constant reminders that it still plays a prominent role in her life.
Margarita isn’t about Laila getting her wings. It’s showing you that she’s had them all along.
Bose never allows the pity of others to sit on Laila’s shoulders for more than a second. Sure, some characters (like her mother, portrayed by Revathi) have more concern for her wellbeing because Laila is disabled, and sure, sometimes Laila faces humiliation and discrimination at the hands of other peoples’ pity. However, Laila’s story is not centered around her disadvantages. Margarita, With a Straw, points out the ways that Laila is a young woman, and just that.
Laila first meets her girlfriend, Khanum at an NYPD police brutality protest. The two hit it off afterward near an assumed tear-gassed street corner, coughing and sputtering out their greetings. Khanum, a queer, blind half-Pakistani, half-Bangladeshi woman takes quickly to Laila’s giddy laugh and gentle nature. Their love story is a quick evolution — one that focuses less on the ways the two have to navigate the challenges of their disabilities in this new relationship, and more on the ways that the two women explore themselves through each other. Their relationship is not meant to paint Laila as the perfect, delicate, angelic disabled girlfriend that is really nice once you give her a chance; she’s messy, and her blunders often have repercussions in the way Khanum sees her. Nevertheless, she’s human, even if her choices make her less likable. Bose’s intentions were not to put her on a pedestal of childlike innocence just because she’s disabled. She makes mistakes and owns up to them, too. It’s a shame that little director’s choices like that go a long way when they’re rarely seen in the film industry.
It doesn’t go unnoticed that almost none of the drama that arises in Laila’s life is a result of her disability. Aside from a few humiliating scenes at Laila’s expense at the beginning of the film, the plot develops naturally without needing to use Cerebral Palsy as a crutch to carry it. Time passes quickly for Koechlin’s character in the short one-hundred minutes of screentime we see of her. This makes some scenes disorienting. If you miss thirty seconds, it very well could be thirty seconds of a conversation that will drive the plot for the rest of the film.
Despite some awkward editing with spliced cuts and strange shifts in setting, the quick pacing of Margarita does provide some realistic scenarios for the characters. In roughly under a minute every time, Laila tackles tricky subjects with her loved ones such as her sexuality, cheating, and death that provide a nicely-sized slice of life perspective for the viewer that never drones on. Stylistically, this could be because Bose is trying to hit home on the idea that Laila’s struggles are never to be dwelled on — not when she has just as many triumphs.
Koechlin’s acting is convincing but never over-the-top or distracting from who Laila is beyond her disability. She received much Western praise for her bold decision to play a disabled, queer character that would be screened in a country that would probably put Margarita through a whole lot of editing before its taboo topics could be viewed there. I commend the amount of time she must have taken to deliver Laila to us with such tasteful respect for who she was, Cerebral Palsy, and all. However, maybe the praise should have gone to actresses living with Cerebral Palsy themselves. As we’ve seen from Roy Frank “RJ”, Mitte playing Walter Jr. in Breaking Bad, these casting choices are possible despite often being dismissed.
Kalki Koechlin is also born to two French parents who raised her in India for most of her life. Although her nationality is Indian, her ethnicity is white, despite her being fluent in English, French, and Hindi. Casting a white girl as the daughter of two ethnically brown parents is pretty controversial. Perhaps the casting of Koechlin for the role of Laila wouldn’t have been so well-received in the Western world had she not been fair-skinned.
More praise should be given to award-winning director Shonali Bose, debut director of Amu (2005). Bose wrote Margarita, With a Straw (aside co-writer, Nilesh Maniyar) while grieving for the death of her sixteen-year-old son, Ishan. The relationship between Laila and her own mother reflects the nurturing bond between Bose and her own son, who was said to have been attached to her hip when he was younger. In heartbreaking symmetry, as Shubhangini must learn to loosen the reins on her perception of Laila in Margarita, Bose must also let her own son go. The haunting dedication to Ishan before the credits roll in Margarita gives even more life to the bond between Laila and her mother. A rushed ending dealing with the subplot of an impending hospitalization of a character in Laila’s story feels a little personal to Bose. I’m not sure it did Margarita justice or that it was in any way necessary to the plot.
Laila’s struggle with sexuality, discrimination, accessibility, and shame means that Margarita is already packed with drama. To tack death onto its ending makes the film a little less digestible, but still brilliant all the same.
Margarita, With a Straw, throws no pity party for Laila. Though nothing is ever handed to her on a silver platter, Laila is happy, secure, and self-assured. She is very rarely ever undesirable — at least not beyond what any other young woman feels after being rejected for the first time. Laila has her own voice, and she knows how to use it. Bose does well to tell Laila’s story without romanticizing Cerebral Palsy or teetering towards the trope in which the oftentimes the disabled main character is finally accepted by mainstream society regardless of the odds she must “overcome”. Bose never touches on the ways the outside world was experiencing Laila — it’s all about what she was experiencing. Laila has Cerebral Palsy, and you’re not meant to forget it, you’re just meant to think, “And? What else?”
The girl can still sip on her Margarita like anyone else, even if she needs a straw to do so.
