From the maker of Dev D, Gulaal and Black Friday... isn’t perhaps the best way to sell That Girl in Yellow Boots. An English language adult film with no stars would struggle to get an audience in India and Anurag Kashyap’s name would sure help get a few people in but this is not the Anurag Kashyap of those three films. This is formatted to the current tenets of international arthouse work, clipped off all his usual operatic overtones and thereafter fittingly selected in Venice and Toronto.

Ironically, That Girl in Yellow Boots almost starts off like a companion piece to Kashyap’s Dev D. It’s like Kalki’s Chanda has landed up in Mumbai from her Paharganj brothel and now operates from a massage parlour. Officially she gives “Swedish Thai Massage” but her client-servicing sessions actually cost Rs 1,000 per handshake aka handjob.

But the half-British Ruth here is more like Devdas himself, craving for love and shuttling between the men and machinations of the maximum city, looking for some unconditional affection. In her big breakdown sequence she cries out in anguish: “My mother wants me to be a saint, you (her boyfriend Prashant, played by Prashant Prakash) just want to f**k, and the rest of the world just want their happy endings!”

What does Ruth want? To find her father, who left her mother and her in England and is somewhere in India. From the warmth the words in the one letter he wrote to her exudes, the girl in yellow boots hopes that in her father she will find her own happy ending.

Kashyap, working from a script co-written with Kalki, populates Ruth’s ruthless search with half-a-dozen characters who may have just two scenes each but are all caught walking their own roads to perdition. Their personal baggage doesn’t weigh down the main plot but rather gives wings — and more meaning — to her journey.

Particularly fascinating is Maya (Pooja Swaroop), the massage parlour manager, who is perennially on the phone indulging in almost-gibberish small talk but always on top of the action around her. And owning the film’s best scene is Chittiappa (Gulshan Devaiya), the south Indian gangster embarrassed for not being able to switch the TV off.

Naseer’s character — and its purpose in the film’s plotting — is perhaps the most obvious narrative device but the thespian plays him so naturally and effectively, that you just enjoy the performance.

Kalki, who married Kashyap recently, is captured in close-ups, some luminous, some silhouettes. Her neutral face doesn’t give away the cauldron of emotions Ruth churns inside her head and it is this mystery that keeps the search alive and kicking.

The shooting format is less functional and more flaunting. Yes, the budget must have gone down but did they really need to shoot a film with a Canon 7D where the camera hardly moves? The minimalism here is more of an attitude, a statement to the festival world against the gloss and glare of big, bad Bollywood. But with digital prints, the movie more often than not looks like a telefilm.

The most heartening bit about That Girl in Yellow Boots is that Kashyap, for the first time, doesn’t deliberately complicate proceedings. His self-indulgence has often overcooked many a celluloid delicacy but here he is in check.

You fear the shocker ending from early on but when it finally arrives you still sit up, eyes wide open. The man has a habit of doing this. That Man with the Original Voice.