Movie Review: That Girl in Yellow Boots
Dark. Disturbing. Distressing. Kudos to Anurag Kashyap for handling such a volatile subject with deadpan honesty. Kalki Koechlin hits the high note with this daring performance handling the emotions that come her way with immense maturity. Your heart goes out to her as Ruth who comes to India from the UK in search of her father. All she wants is to be loved and love in return. She misses that stability of a father’s presence in her life and though she hardly remembers her father, she knows she now needs him in her life. She was five when her father left the family and her 15-year-old step sister was involved in a ‘sexual mishap’. That incident scarred her for life and she is in search of answers, which brings her in search of her father.
What Anurag Kashyap tried to experiment with in No Smoking, he has succeeded with That Girl In Yellow Boots. Kashyap is known for experimenting with alternate cinema throwing in that shock value. With this film, he shocks. BIG TIME. And the shock absorbed by the central character Ruth, played by Kalki and the way she handles it is stupefying to say the least. Kashyap has taken care of the little things that form the larger picture on the screen that adds value to an emotion.
Kalki’s Ruth is actually an extension of Dev D, another Anurag Kashyap film. In Dev D, Kalki as Chanda works as a prostitute by night to fund her studies after being disowned by her family after being trapped in an MMS scandal. Here, she lands a job in a massage parlour without a work permit. She has all sorts of customers coming for her ‘services’.
Apart from Kalki, watch out for Gulshan Devaiya, the don with a difference. An applause worthy performance for his portrayal of Chittiappa.
You may not be able to enjoy the movie, but you will definitely take home a lesson. A lesson Anurag has clinically passed on with an underlying, chilling message: Children from broken families are always broken from the inside. No matter how tough they appear from the outside.
Rating: 4 / 5
Martin D’Souza
This first appeared on glamsham on August 31, 2011
