Girl on Top

The film which has been directed and co-written by Anurag Kashyap,portrays the travails of a bi-racial woman named Ruth,who comes to Mumbai in search of her elusive father,whom she has not met since childhood when her sister committed suicide. While she tries to trace her father,she takes up work in a massage parlour,where she is prey to sexual advances. “When I came to Mumbai to visit my parents during vacations from England,I had to go to the Foreigners Registration Office each time to get my tourist visa stamped. Being an Indian,that was frustrating. Besides,people don’t stop staring at you if you are fair-skinned in this country,” she recalls. In the film,Koechlin plays the protagonist,Ruth.

Koechlin’s French parents migrated to India four decades back. After spending her initial years in Pondicherry,Koechlin moved to Ooty but was still treated like an outsider because of her skin. “While writing,most incidents are generated by the author’s personal experience. It was the same for me too. The rest was fictional — stuff I heard from others,” explains Koechlin,who finished writing the script in two months last year. The film was shot within the year.

Writing the script,she says,happened at the insistence of her boyfriend Kashyap,who said she “would do justice to characters in the story”. “Since I had no other projects in hand I was free to experiment with script-writing,” says the actor whose previous writing assignments have been for theatre. In fact,her play The Skeleton Woman,was staged in Mumbai and Delhi several times last year. But writing for films,was quite different,she concedes. “It requires visualising the story,thinking of the plot,fitting it into a genre. These are things I am not good at. I am more concerned about the dialogues between characters and the chemistry between them. Don’t ask me to put a beginning,a middle and an end to the story. That is Anurag’s job,” she laughs,adding,“I stayed away from him while I wrote the film. I just handed him the final script. He tweaked it as per his need.” Koechlin says she is happy with the way her career has shaped up. “I am happy doing different things — plays and films with commercially viable directors,” says the actor,whose next film after That Girl in Yellow in Boots,is Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s production,My Friend Pinto.