This past Friday saw the release of a new competitive dance movie, “Best of the Best.” Featuring “Never Have I Ever” star Matreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia debuting in her first major film, the two play Maya and Anjali. Maya signs them both up for the school’s competitive Bollywood-fusion dance team, UCLA Agni, named after the Hindu god of fire. You’ll watch them juggle friendships, love lives, academics, and intense drama as the team competes to be the best of the best.
College is stereotypically a coming-of-age period, where we learn what kind of people we want to be, and who we want in our lives. Co-writers Prashanth Venkataramanujam and Hasan Minhaj wanted to demonstrate this not only with Maya and Anjali, who experience hardship and almost lose their lifelong friendship, but also with dance teams specifically. Venkataramanujam and Minhaj were both on Bollywood-fusion dance teams at their respective schools and wanted to share this passion that is not only a creative outlet for so many South Asian students, outside of their complex majors, but also a source of community building and cultural connection.
If you’ve already watched this and thought it reminded you of some other popular competitive dance movies, you wouldn’t be the first. It’s been compared to “Step Up 2” and “Bring It On” by Cosmopolitan and Ramakrishnan herself. But what specifically makes these movies so similar, and what makes them different? To start, each of these three movies has a sort of halfway point, which ends up with them at the bottom, then the championship, where they come out on top.
After this halfway point, they make championships on a technicality, so they must come up with a new routine that will give them a shot at winning. And of course, they all feature some sort of rivalry. As for differences, the main one is the style of dance. “Bring It On” deals with a cheer competition, “Step Up 2” deals with street dance, and, like already mentioned, “Best of the Best” features Bollywood-fusion: a combination of hip-hop, Indian classical, contemporary, and theatrical dance. Another big difference between these films is the level of these competitions. While “Bring It On” and “Step Up 2” deal mostly with high schoolers, one at an official competition, the other at an illegal dance ring, Best of the Best deals with college students.
After watching “Best of the Best,” I’m not only grateful the writers did so much research, as two men writing two female leads, but I also came out of my watch with a newfound appreciation for Bollywood dance, and the amount of work it takes. In an interview with Cosmopolitan, Ramakrishnan and Kedia explained how they had to attend a four-month dance camp, with four to five hour classes, often averaging 40-hour weeks. What stood out to me the most with this movie was how accurately it portrayed the transition from high school to college. Anjali got into UCLA off the waitlist, and was struggling with the coursework, eventually getting put on academic probation. Meanwhile, Maya excels in school, setting the curve in one of the classes we see, as well as the dance team, but is pushed away for rejecting what she labels “predictable,” explaining that to win, they need to stand out. The stress of classes, the urge to try new things and put yourself out there, can cause even lifelong friendships to break, as you discover who you truly are as a person. After watching this film, I decided to look into whether we have a Bollywood dance team here at The University of Connecticut, and discovered UConn Surya, named after the Hindu solar deity. They compete in the Desi Dance Network (DDN), getting first place at Taaza in 2024, with a Mulan-inspired routine.
Overall, being new to Bollywood-fusion as a whole, this movie did a fantastic job at introducing the style in a way that’s easy to digest, because it’s already so familiar to us due to competitive dance films being so common. I can easily say that this is one of my top movies of the year, getting a 5/5 from me. Not only because of how accurate they made the transition from high school to college, but also the amazing cast, costumes and set. I highly recommend watching this film, whether you have knowledge of Bollywood dance or not.