SPOILER ALERT
That Girl In Yellow Boots
It is a film about ‘Hand-Shake’ or Hand-Job and about a stepfather who visits his stepdaughter’s massage parlour to receive it from her. For your information, Hand-Job is ‘an act of male masturbation performed on a man by someone else’. A firangi girl cajoles her customers into opting for this premium service to make extra dough, and to live happily in an extremely lecherous and corrupt world. She is a trained masseur and not one who can be easily fooled. She also has a boy friend, a small-time crook, who gets into trouble with a south Indian ‘bhai’.
We are informed that the film is about a firangi girl’s search for her missing father. There is very little of that search in the film, just a few scenes that pop in once in a while. The film hovers around the familiar territory of the director - visually, thematically, and even in terms of characterizations and performances. He seems to be stuck in a rut of his own clichés. The film’s female lead and writer Kalki Koechlin is also part of that rut. It is a rutty film all the way. The reviewers who are praising it as a masterpiece are plain idiots. The film’s selection in the Venice and Toronto film fests means nothing. There are all kinds of films that get included in the official programme of these festivals for various reasons.
Anurag Kashyap and Kalki underline their extremely boring worldview with an extra thick marker pen, making it more of a release of a long suppressed fart than a serious expression of art. They turn the film into a running commentary on issues ranging from Mumbai traffic, to the lecherous nature of police officers and government babus. Almost 80% dialogues of the film pertain to such commentary. The film offers no new insight into anything.
There is a lengthy and banal conversation between Kalki and Naseeruddin Shah about the Lucky signal and the Bermuda triangle. How much more obtuse can you get than to use the brief appearance of the thespian in your film to deliver a sermon on traffic jams at the Lucky signal (a signal near Lucky Restaurant at Bandra, a well-known Mumbai suburb in India)? It is as much a waste of precious talent, as valuable life-giving sperms at the culmination of a hand-job.
Let us return to the theme of the film. Is this film about exploring, investigating, and exposing the hand-job scam that goes on in massage parlors? Or is it a film about incest? What has incest got to do with a hand-job? Why are the two themes juxtaposed? Is it to enhance the shock-value of the film? So, the film is about shocking people. Is it about shocking people with the issue of incest or hand-jobs, or about the murderous nature of the Mumbai underworld? What is this story about? What is its premise? Is it a film about dysfunctional families? We don’t see the family anywhere. Is it a film about a stepdaughter's ardent mission to locate her stepfather becasue she has received a mail from him? She does not seem to be doing that since she devotes more time to giving 'hand-shakes'.
And if you really wanted to shock the audiences, the stepfather could have been the biological father. That too happens, fathers can sexually desire their young daughters and even make them pregnant, or mothers may have children from their sons. This would have been still more sensational, bringing the shit out of the deepest recesses of the small intestine to raise the stink, pushing the envelope to the farthest. This is becoming the leitmotif of Anurag Kashyap cinema. Why does he do it? Just to raise some cheap laughter in the cinema hall and provide sensational talking points to a few fools?
It also seems as if the film is designed to provide a platform to Kalki Koechlin, to re-establish her as a combo of a ‘tragedy queen’, and a psycho, forever suffering from the phobia that everyone is out to fuck a white-skinned female drug-addict. And why do you have to contrive a more than 90-minute film just to lecture a sex maniac and pedophile stepfather that he has a sick mind? As if he or the audience does not know it. Don’t waste your talent and our time and money to shock us by telling us a story about the obvious and known. Bring us your unique perspective of all the shit that goes on in our society like a good artist. Even our third-class TV reporters would not state the obvious in such a non-artistic manner.
This film is not even a good character study. Look at the characterization of the stepfather for instance. He comes across as a pedestrian guy, and not an ace foreign-returned photographer, or an Oshoite. And an Oshoite may not suffer so much from repressed sexuality after having participated in the ‘Tantra Meditation’ orgies in an Osho commune. Why did he have to be an Osho follower? Is it because Anurag Kashyap was so keen to deliver a ‘mind blowing’ punch-line like ‘Bhagwan ko bhi register kara diya hai’. Or was he using it as a metaphor to suggest that Oshoites are depraved and mentally sick? Should we finally conclude that the film is about exposing the devious Osho cult?
The only positive thing about this film is its visual quality. If we can achieve such good results from 5D Cannon SLR, we don’t need expensive cameras and large crews to shoot feature films. The entire film is supposedly shot using this revolutionary camera. Ram Gopal Verma should learn a few things about shot composition, lighting, etc. and low-cost cinematography from Kashyap.
RKS
