Film by Bhavana Rajendran, Rency Philip and Sharanya Ramprakash
Bad Behaviour is a street performance exploring Brigade Road and surrounding neighbourhoods that gave Bangalore its moniker ‘the Pub City’ in the 80s and 90s. Today, Brigade Road is more of a commercial street than the ‘cool, hip and happening’ area it used to be with iconic places like NASA, Pub World, Galaxy Theatre, Rex Theatre, Brigade Gardens, Time ‘n’ Again, Black Cadillac, FoxTrot, Spin and other has-been spaces that were for drinking, dancing, and cruising.
Against the modern-day celebrations of queerness and gender inclusivity, the film addresses the phasing out of the older popular bars on Brigade Road. This is presented through the perspective of two women in drag invoking middle-aged gay men who are past their heyday, donning distinct personas of pub goers of erstwhile Bangalore. They go on a pub crawl seeking the places of their youth, getting progressively inebriated as the film progresses and reliving the same (but not same) streets as older men but this time freer and gayer than before.
Through the film, Brigade Road acts as a metaphor for a city that is rapidly modernising and changing for an entire generation of marginalised people and what that now means for their own existence.
