With "That Girl in Yellow Boots", Anurag Kashyap moves into what is known as the International art-house circuit. Films here are generally about weird out of place characters stuck in emotional turmoil. Generally sexuality or the abuse of it is the undercurrent theme of most of these films. Most characters are depraved and yet seemingly deep. Most importantly most of it is about people who you will never meet or never know in real life. The situations and locations in the films will be so out of place that you will trouble identifying with almost all of them. These films are bold and more often than not for the sake of being bold.
"That Girl in Yellow Boots" is all of the above. Shot extensively well it tells a poignant story of an English girl Ruth (Kalki Koechlin) who is illegally in India. She is searching for her father who left her and her mother a long time ago. To sustain herself and pay the bribes to the authorities she works in a massage parlor where she also earns a quick thou on every hand job she does. To add to this dreary existence is a cocaine addicted boyfriend (an unknown Prashant Prakash) and a Kannada gangster (a brilliant Gulshan Devaiya last seen in Shaitan) looking to get his money back.
Many other world weary characters come and go. Like the annoyingly loquacious massage receptionist who keeps flirting on the phone (a superb Pooja Swarup), an old fatherly figure (Naseeruddin Shah) who only comes to the parlor for a good clean massage and a slimy inspector who keeps turning up and demanding money (for what reasons we are never told).
Amidst all of this the film becomes a list of interlaced seemingly disconnected scenes of either Ruth massaging (read pleasuring) someone or searching for her father by finding his namesake who has the same occupation as her father.
The film pretty much has a solid Kalki in every frame. She lights up at every opportunity that brings her nearer to her father and at the same time makes you realize her frustration as someone who is constantly meeting expectations of strangers. It is a wonderfully dark role and Kalki's silence at most times speaks volumes.
Anurag Kashyap as usual frames each shot with much care but one can't help but wonder that he seems to have blurred the line between shocking us through realistic characters in extraordinary situations and shocking us for the sake of shocking.
So in the end you might end up questioning why such unnecessarily outrageous, vulgar and sexually charged up tones are present in almost all representations in this grim mystery. Why is it that the boyfriend is such an extreme figure trying to rehabilitate himself by chaining himself to a window? Why is the gangster called Chitiappa, so that the C word can be repeated again and again? and not to mention the art decor house that Ruth lives in which seems overtly engulfed with decay. Or for that matter the shocking ending which folks would have seen coming half way through the movie (though not the identity of the person in question) I guess Anurag constantly is trying to break the barrier of how politically incorrect he can get with his movies and if the price to pay is a storyline or disconnected characters, then so be it. What he does not realize is that audience will only remember this for the shock value and not some artistic vision that the International Art-house Circuit often enjoys.
But to his credit, there is one thing that the film does prove that Anurag Kashyap can handle complex emotional subjects with amazing control and not create something that could have easily slipped into a depressing and ugly snooze fest. In the end, TGIYB would be remembered as one of the also made for a director who would eventually be counted as one of the all time greats for Indian Cinema.
Final Recommendation That Girl in Yellow Boots is worth a watch but to film freaks who like to be shocked and are looking for the discerning stuff esp. for fans of Gaspar Noe and Lars Von Trier. For other enthusiastic fans of the multiplex movies (read Shaitan, Dev D etc. ) this may not be the shoe they want to try on. Fans of commercial fare like Wanted and Dabangg might as well stay miles away from this lest they get nightmares.
