Seated bang in the middle of the theatre, actress Kalki Koechlin was a bundle of nerves as her movie Margarita, with a Straw premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September. The unusual choice of seat (typically the cast sits in the front) gave her full access to the faintest of reactions, murmurs and spot reviews from the audience. Many in the audience were people with cerebral palsy, and their reaction mattered most to Koechlin. In the movie, she plays Laila, a teenage girl grappling with the same disability. Once the lights came back on, Koechlin’s convincing performance had many fooled. “Those who didn’t know me were surprised that I didn’t really have cerebral palsy (CP). Only one guy came up to me and said, ‘I would have totally believed it, except that you had muscles, which a person with CP can’t have.’ I thought, ‘Damn! A little miss from the costume department,’” she says with a laugh.
It’s a slip you might be willing to forgive. It took Koechlin six months to prepare for the part. Last week, she even bagged the best actress award at the Black Nights Festival in Tallinn, Estonia, in recognition of her efforts.
A considerable amount of prep time was spent with director Shonali Bose’s cousin, Malini Chib, the inspiration behind the character of Laila. Chib is a disability rights activist and the author of
The remark hit home hard. “Malini has a double MA, she’s gone to Oxford and written a book. But still, in a conversation she can’t come up with a quick answer. She’s thinking it, but it takes time to communicate. By that point the joke has gone. That’s the frustration I wanted to capture,” says Koechlin. Chib has a more severe form of CP compared to what Laila’s character has in the film. The filmmakers took that creative call because they wanted the audience to comprehend everything the character was saying. Koechlin had intensive sessions with Chib’s speech therapist and physiotherapist to learn the mannerisms, speech and shortness of breath. “We tried so many things like putting marbles in my mouth. When I had to get my wisdom teeth extracted, I asked the dentist to give me an extra shot so that my tongue would be dead,” she recalls.
The strict attention to detail was required to make the character authentic, yet Koechlin says she was careful not to portray her as an object of pity, which several films on disability are guilty of. On the contrary, her Laila has a rather eventful life. Much like “any teenager with raging hormones,” she surfs dodgy porn sites and guzzles margaritas, but with the help of a straw. Reeling from rejection from a man she fancies in Delhi, Laila takes up a creative-writing course at New York University to escape the humiliation. She later finds herself drawn to Khanum, an older woman she meets at a protest march, and forges an intimate relationship with her.
Speaking about the physical relationship between the two women characters, Koechlin says, “It’s not a sexy scene. In a world where we are showing sexuality in a particular light, with oil all over our body, it is nice to show something so real. You can’t even take your clothes off without somebody’s help if you have CP,” she says. Yet, shooting full-frontal nudity is not an experience she looks back at fondly. “I thought I was so comfortable with my body. I said, ‘Ya man, please go for it.’ By the end of it I started crying,” she says.
It’s no surprise then that on the last day of shoot at Coney Island in New York, Koechlin leapt out of her wheelchair and ran across the beach with abandon. The film is scheduled to release in India early next year. Given that the film tackles bisexuality, the actress hopes for a fuss-free release in the country. Her film Happy Ending, a romantic comedy in which she plays Saif Ali Khan’s nagging girlfriend, was just the cure she needed to get past the Margarita hangover, even though it flopped at the box office. “I would love to do more commercial films but not many come my way because I am in this box of a ‘very serious actor’. I think people look at me as a dark, raving feminist,” says Koechlin.
But being French, and born and raised in Puducherry, she has broken stereotypes all her life. “I always get questions like, Do you like India? You can eat spicy food? And in the streets they will be like ‘Hey beauty’. Only when you turn around and reply in Tamil, can you break that image,” she says. The perception, to some degree, continues to dog her even today. After separating from her husband, filmmaker Anurag Kashyap, last year, it wasn’t easy for Koechlin to find an apartment. “When I moved into my flat, I could see my neighbours were suspicious. They probably thought — ‘White girl, just broke up with Anurag, Bollywood actress…’ But I knocked on their door and said hello. They later said, ‘ Kitni simple ladki hai . So nice.’ So the stereotype breaks as soon as you do it,” she explains.
It also helps that filmmakers have slowly begun to see her fit into various moulds and not just as the white girl. A lot of those parts came her way after she debuted in Kashyap’s Dev D . When all else fails she goes back to her roots in theatre to sharpen her craft. “It always helps me when I do a film right after a play,” she says. This year, Trivial Disaster , directed by acclaimed theatre director Atul Kumar, had a successful run across the country.
Koechlin’s currently in the midst of writing her own play, which she has tentatively titled A Play on Death . The grim name may reinforce the beliefs of those who consider her a “dark and serious” actor. But don’t be surprised if she breaks that myth as well.