New Delhi: Bathing in the warm glow of the success of Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, where she played Natasha, the uptight and accidental fiancée of Abhay Deol, actor Kalki Koechlin is back to the big screen this week as That Girl in Yellow Boots who tests her strengths in an unfriendly city in search of her roots.
Koechlin, an unusual face with mysterious traits, was launched by her husband and director Anurag Kashyap for the first time in Dev D as a schoolgirl turned sex worker Leni. Critiques then were confused about what stand to take. She was nowhere close to the conventional 'heroine' material, but was strikingly clean in her method acting.
She looked innocent even when she seduced clients on telephone in several languages. Chanda, her character's other name, looked lonely but not helpless, even in those scenes where the society laughs at her.
She was the true revelation of the film, especially for those audiences who had heard about the so called 'hot line phone numbers' but had never seen the divas behind the mouthpieces. She played Chanda as per the objective sensibility, rather than any 'filmy' perception. Her fragile appearance coupled with deliberately used silence made Kalki believable.
Kalki's next after Dev D was Shaitan, another Anurag Kashyap production, where she donned a difficult role of a mentally challenged young girl. She again stayed true to the character. In such a time, when new Bollywood actresses such as Sonam, Deepika, Asin and many others are busy in doing the same kind of roles in film after film, she has shown the promise to experiment. It's true that she does not qualify as a crowd puller but she has started to make a separate kind of fan following.
ZNMD did not give her ample chance to stand out among the star crowd but she tried to leave her mark. She was not given punch lines and enough of the screen time. In a nut shell, she was just filler.
One characteristic that makes Kalki special is her writing skills. Sometimes, it seems that Kalki tries too hard to remain faithful to the writer's narration of the character, rather than her own instincts. For example, take those scenes in Shaitan, where she tries to redo the clichés, because the writer had put them on paper, while she could have easily followed her own method acting. It was evident in confrontation scenes particularly.
Kalki's writing skills will be under scanner with the release of That Girl in Yellow Boots as she is the co-writer, but her past stints with the cine screen and the promos of TGIYB give her the initial advantage.
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