That Girl in Yellow Boots

That Girl in Yellow Boots, screened at the Venice and Toronto festivals, looks at Mumbai’s bustling lowlife from the viewpoint of a foreigner. After the suicide of her teenage sister, Ruth (Kalki Koechlin) comes to Mumbai to look for her Indian father, who abandoned the family years earlier. Unable to get a work permit, she takes up a job that her parasitic, drug-addict boyfriend Prashant gets her - in a seedy massage parlour, where she gives "happy endings” to customers for an extra buck. But the local goon Chittiappa Gowda, to whom Prashant owes money, takes Ruth’s savings. Despairing, exploited by everyone around her, yet resolutely driven by an existential crisis, Ruth tries to track down her father. When she finally locates him, nothing prepares her for the shock of discovering who he is. Koechlin, an Indian actress-playwright of French descent and Kashyap’s former partner, is very good as the vulnerable, yet stoic Ruth. The film openly addresses paedophilia, usually taboo in Indian cinema. Shot by DOP Rajeev Ravi in just thirteen days, the film captures the claustrophobia of an outsider in the metropolis. The screenplay, co-written by Koechlin, powerfully evokes what it means to be a single foreign woman in Mumbai, yet is complex enough not to encourage a simplistic empathy towards Ruth, since many of her troubles are her own doing.