It is one of those inescapable ironies of Bollywood that the tremendously talented Kalki Koechlin had to play a supporting role to Katrina Kaif in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. They come from similar backgrounds—half-Caucasian, half-Indian, both struggling with the Hindi language. And yet so different in their personalities. Ever wondered why Kalki is not considered among the great contemporary actresses even after the performances listed below?
That Girl In Yellow Boots (2010):
There is this kind of cinema that blends the real smells and sounds of the suburbia with a surrealistic dreamscape that scans and demystifies the main protagonist's inner life, creating the external manifestation of his or her inner world in terms that can only be described as image-enchanting. That Girl In Yellow Boots is the story of a British girl Ruth's searches for her biological father in the noisy dispassionate chaos of Mumbai. It is also a film that marks the coming of age of Kalki Koechlin. Whether the Lolita-Chandramukhi in Dev D or Abhay Deol's annoyingly upper-class girlfriend in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, there was always something about that girl. And now we know what it is. In That Girl In Yellow Boots, Kalki takes us on a journey through her character Ruth's outer and inner world in a way that very few protagonists have done in recent times. We see her distanced and detached from the lascivious clamour of Mumbai (captured in gloriously grating detail by Rajeev Ravi's colourful camerawork). But in some weird and inexplicable way, Ruth is also an integral part of the suburban chaos that repudiates her identity. Fighting off lewd advances in bureaucratic offices, giving 'handshakes' (read: handjobs) to customers in the massage parlour, dealing with a junkie boyfriend (Prashant Prakash, aptly cast) who refuses to be tied down (and we mean that literally), and confronting a Kannada gangster (Gulshan Devaiya), Ruth, as played by Kalki, is a splendid survivor. Emotionally battered and permanently bruised she emerges at the end above the sickening chaos of peddlers, pimps, prostitutes, and the other manifestations of Mumbai's murky underbelly.
The camera cruises Ruth's places of pleasure and pain with the exploratory scrupulousness of a voyager waiting to discover an unattainable Utopia. Ruth's world is doomed. She is not. Anurag Kashyap has always shown a keen eye for dereliction. Here he swoops down on Ruth's world of fringe existence. The ruthless rootless Mumbai is a world that neither accepts nor rejects her. The sequences in the massage parlour where she works illegally are the liveliest, thanks in no small measure to actress Puja Sarup playing the voluble parlour owner. She is a prized find, if for no other reason than for threatening to gouge out the mighty Naseeruddin Shah's eyes. Oh yes, Naseeruddin Shah also drops in. And he's a spot of sunshine in Ruth's cold scheming universe. He is the only customer who treats Kalki with paternal affection. Fortified against any emotional attachment, her feelings bottled up and her inner world walled from hurt, Ruth rejects all attachment. All sorts of men drop in at the parlour looking for "happy endings", a euphemism for orgasms. There is no happy ending to Ruth's story, though. Stranded in a world that she cannot own or even occupy, Ruth's search for her father becomes a much larger metaphor for the search for roots that constantly takes us away from home in pursuit of dreams that do not have any logic relevance or even a basic link to reality. There are portions in the film that tend to get over-indulgent in their realism.
The first time that the Kannada gangster visits Ruth's place, he-and the sequence-overstay the welcome. The finale is a letdown. Ruth's search for Daddy comes to a virtual dead-end leaving us feeling as betrayed as Ruth. And does sex work as a bargaining point for a young solitary sexy girl in ALL her professional dealings in an Indian city? (Come on; give the working girl a break!)The questions have no easy answers. What remains with us are the deep fissures in the conscience that Anurag's narration crystallizes by building a labyrinth of real characters played by interesting engaging actors in full-fledged and cameo parts. If you look hard you will see director Hansal Mehta and actor Rajat Kapoor in walk-on parts. Standing at the centre of Kashyap's volatile treatise on hope-on-dope, despair, love and its loss in the underbelly of the metropolis is Kalki Koechlin whose face is an effortless map of the human heart. As played by Kalki Ruth remains a cross between an enigma and a survivor, a fighter and manipulator, a victim and a vamp, a lady and a tramp. You may forget those yellow boots. But you will never forget the girl wearing them.
Margarita With A Straw (2014):
At the end of this exquisitely designed film, I wasn't sure whether I had just watched a film about a very special life of a specially-abled girl who can't move a limb without her mother's help, but has the hots for ... let me see, at least 2 boys and 1 woman. And we are still counting. Or was I watching an extraordinary rendition of the mother-daughter relationship done in shades so distinctive and deep, you leave behind a part of your being with the film when you leave the theatre even as you take home with you something invaluable. Margarita With A Straw, so named because its cerebral palsy-afflicted stubbornly spirited heroine would have the cocktail in a tumbler with a straw, but have she will, is a film that leaves you profoundly enriched. The film creates a crisscross of complicated relationships among human beings who seek normalcy in their strenuously challenged lives both within their homes and outside. But the beauty of it is the tangles in which human beings find themselves in their quest for kinship tend to solve themselves in the end. It's the way life works, so what's the big deal? Says this remarkable film. Shonali Bose's film never stops to wonder what Laila's life would have been like had she been ....well, normal. Being normal! Now, that's a question which the film's brilliantly written script, never stops to entertain.
Non-judgmental to the core and never fearful of peering into forbidden areas of the human psyche (in one of the many bravely executed sequences, Laila pleasures herself away from her mother's watchful eyes after watching porn clips on her laptop), Margarita With A Straw blends commentary on dysfunctional lives with that sense of profound yearning which comes to any individual who aspires to go beyond her allotted space in life. Laila's aspirations take her through a geopolitical emotional and sexual journey that finally leaves her, and us, wiser. All three levels of Laila's education are textured into the plot with a minimum of fuss. Shonali Bose cuts through moments and montages from Laila's life with luminous austerity. We see more than what meets the eye, and not only because the film's editors (Monisha Baldawa and Bob Brooks) have done their jobs effectively, but also because this film believes in saying a lot about the quality of human life without wasting time in self-pity.
Tears, you will see, don't get a chance to roll down cheeky cheeks here. It is precisely because the film refuses to ruminate on the tragic grandeur of life that it creates a sense of unassuming dignity in the lives that we see on screen, none more bravely and emphatically dignified in adversity than Laila. As played by the exceptionally gifted Kalki Koechlin, Laila is a bit of a tease....not just with men but with life as well. Kalki makes every encounter in Laila's life from Delhi University to New York University special and memorable. I especially cherish the mother-daughter scenes between Revathy and Kalki. They are heartwarming and heartbreaking because they never forget to be completely truthful to the given (tragic) context while striving to be supremely cinematic. This is as opportune a moment as any to say Kalki in the central part shines in a space where her character's disability assumes no pre-ponderance. This is a major transcendental triumph for the actress, as much of her speech is spoken in a slur. Kalki takes Laila beyond the world of words. It is those eyes. The goddamned wounded eyes. They serve as a window to Laila's soul.
Waiting (2014):
There are hospitals — and there are hospitals — to take care of the ill. But there are no schools to teach us how to cope with the ill. Waiting is about two people whose respective spouses are seriously ill and in a coma. Shiv (Naseeruddin Shah) and Tara (Kalki Koechlin) are just…waiting…waiting for a miracle, perhaps? Of the two Tara is the younger, hence angry, confused, and bitter. Shiv, who doesn’t know his from Adam (or Eve) takes charge of her — sort of — holds her hand — sort of — and guides her through the various stages that the bereaved must go through before they attain a state of calm acceptance. There is this elegantly-staged scene in Tara’s hotel room where Shiv explains to her how she must make her bewildered way through the many emotions that destiny has suddenly thrust on her by putting her husband in a state of mortal uncertainty. Here, and everywhere else, we can see and hear in Naseer’s voice the full force of his experience in the art of bereavement. The beauty of watching Waiting is that no one needs to fake it. Not the actors and not us the audience. We’ve all gone through the process of dealing with loss, or worse still, impending loss when someone dying in the other room is so close to your heartbeat, you wish you could lend some of your breath to the dying beloved. It is this sense of lived-in experience that makes Anu Menon’s post-debut mellow-drama so denuded of drama it smells like life.
Nothing that Ms. Menon did in her first film picaresque rom-com London Paris New York prepared us for the emotional journey she undertakes in Waiting. If wisdom is what we gather from travel, then Ms. Menon seems far more widely travelled in Waiting than she did in her debut film. Though confined largely to a hospital, Waiting never overpowers you with the smell of antiseptic nor stifles you with gloom. There is a bright light piercing the dark mood of mortality that envelopes the film. Though outwardly the grim tale is swathed in somberness miraculously Ms. Menon bathes the two main characters’ irredeemably depressing predicament in a dip of sunshine.
A lot of the positivity that the film exudes has to do with the two principal performances. Kalki with her rebellious mood swings and defiant attitude to destiny makes the traumatized young wife’s role so vivid and vibrant, you just want to hug her and calm her down. Provided she doesn’t sock you in the crotch for stepping the line. And what better antidote to hysteria than Naseeruddin Shah? Sagacious and so gracious in his suffering he brings to his role of the bereaved husband the kind of intrinsic tranquility that only the wisest possess. There are also some very interesting peripheral characters and performances. Ratnabali Bhattacharjee is Kalki’s best friend who is caring and concerned but has her own life to live. Rajat Kapoor as a pragmatic, sometimes ruthless doctor is excellent, though you do wonder if there are more doctors in the vast hospital. And Rajeev Ravindranathan as a king gentle godfearing office colleague of Kalki’s comatose husband is so spot-on you wonder if the man knows he is acting.
There are many points of polemical discussion that this big-little film raises on the trauma of grief morality and medical ethics. To its credit, the film doesn’t allow the narrative to be weighed down by existential issues. By and large, the two actors are given room to let their bonding over a bout of bereavement grow organically. Apart from a few strenuous episodes (Tara’s sudden outburst on seeing messages on her comatose husband’s phone from a colleague who turns out to be just a male buddy, is jarring), Waiting swims through the tides of its traumatic design with candour and grace. This is a gentle moving heartbreaking story of two strangers bonded by bereavement, one wise and retrained and reluctant to use the ‘F’ word even when life f***s him over, the other volatile and temperamental and so proud of her Twitter sociability that she didn’t get time to realize life is not about how many followers you have, but how minutely you read the writing on the wall. Not since Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox have I seen an Indie film addressing itself to the ageless issue of human desolation and individual loneliness.
Ribbon (2017)
And then, something happens. Something awful and irreversibly life-changing happens in this true-life portrait of an urban marriage threatening to fall apart under the strain of coping with daily vicissitudes. Debutant director Raakhee Sandilya uses her two principal actors to mirror metropolitan mores and meltdowns with masterful vigour and a scrupulous authenticity. The camera is used not to accentuate or glamorize Mumbai’s suburbia but to simply serve as a functional topography for the lives of the couple Sahana and Karan played with such an absence of bravura and flourish that we forget Kalki and Sumeet Vyas are playing characters who don’t exist beyond the film. At least not in the way we see them here. The authenticity instilled into the couple’s lives is comparable with what Basu Bhattacharya achieved with Rajesh Khanna and Sharmila Tagore in the remarkable portrait of a marriage on the skids in Aavishkar 43 years ago. Director Raakhee Sandilya’s protagonists are not played by stars and one of them has not been seen on the large screen before.
Kalki and Sumeet penetrate the lives of their characters with incredible alacrity. No time is wasted in bringing their lives as close to us as cinematically possible. We enter their lives without fuss or ceremony and we leave them just as quickly, with no room for farewells. Sandilya strips the film of all vanity. There is very little background music to highlight even the highest summits of emotions in the narration so that we get the feeling of an unpolished raw home video. Hurting and hurtful. Kalki plays the more aggressive partner. And why not? Early in the plot (if one may accuse this film of resorting to plotting devices) Sahana….well, she loses the plot when her seemingly supportive boss turns wary and hostile after she returns from her maternity leave. The scenes of Sahana’s workplace politics make us flinch. Yup, this is what goes on when women workers get too big for their boots. The sequences where the couple deal with their child’s hired ayah abound in the scent of lived-in familiarity. Every working couple silently suffers the tantrums of its house help. The ribbon is a subverted upturned take on all the family films we’ve seen in the 1960s and 70s. If Jeetendra and Leena Chandarvarkar in L V Prasad’s Bidaai were to set up home in Mumbai today, this is what they would have to deal with.
If Ribbon was not such a sharply aligned slice-of-life story it would be a horror film, much in the same way that Daron Aronofsky’s Mother is. It is disturbing in its implied critique on the nuclear family where couples choose to keep their parents out. The last 30 minutes of the film is a separate beast, bound to serve up a wallop of shock, disgust, and despair in the audience as they watch the couple’s helpless attempts to keep their self-limited world from falling apart. A lot of the scenes between the couple seem so spontaneous and unrehearsed, almost as if the lead pair walked into situations in the script that they had inherited from a couple who lived there before them. Ribbon captures the rhythms of metropolitan life with such a vehement repudiation of drama that I often forgot I was watching fiction. The ribbon has its share of flaws. So relentless is the focus on the protagonists’ lives that we barely get a glimpse in the lives of the other (interesting but sketchy) characters, like Sahana’s friend or Karan’s father or the babysitter-ayah who leads a life as adventurous as her employers’ lives, if not more. But that, some other time.
Jia Aur Jia (2016):
Why should boys have all the fun? Just the sheer pleasure of watching two of our feistiest actresses in a road movie set in Sweden is enough of a kickback to sail through what is at best a girl-bonding flick with plenty of perk and pizzazz, thanks to the crackling and hissing chemistry between the two lead actresses. The basic premise is promising. Two very dissimilar girls share the same name and nothing else. Kalki is outgoing, loud, gregarious, and bindaas. Richa is quiet, withdrawn, and repressed.
One wants to live every moment. The other wants her life to end the sooner the better. Though the aggression between them is overdone, their initial bickering is well scripted and gives away some of what the characters are holding back. The striking visuals help anchor the two protagonists’ road journeys. Very often the film looks like a pretext for promoting Swedish tourism. But then debutant director Howard Rosemyer has some surprises for the second half when the narrative sobers down to a treacly trickle of tears. Despite its manipulative mould of getting our attention—if one of the protagonists is dying and the other one just wants to die then the audience is bound to get concerned—the characters move us into believing in their grief and spurts of joy. It’s hard to imagine the film working without the Jias. Richa Chaddha and Kalki Koechlin sneak a seductive synergy into the proceedings. They know they are playing ‘Sober’ and ‘Bindaas’ and they bring their most cherished acting chops into the picture.
You will be thoroughly regaled by the two actresses, especially in the way they reverse gender biases. Kalki openly lusts after Swedish men on the streets, the way a single Indian male would if he saw firangi women in a foreign town. The two girls sing raunchy songs, swig beer, and swing together through some madcap adventures which don’t always make sense. Watch out for the sequence in a hospital bed where Kalki talks about her future and why she can’t have it. See the film for the Kalki-Richa jugal-bonding and yes for the way the film uses the evergreen Shankar-Jaikishan/Lata Mangeshkar/Mohd Rafi song Jiya oh jiya kuch bol do to reiterate life’s most valuable lessons.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.
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