Her first film, again directed by Anurag Basu, was a stark glimpse of the “tone” that Ranaut’s raw-outsider credentials might have inspired her to embrace. Simran was her name, and she drank, slurred, loved, lusted, cried, lied, cheated and screamed her way to debut glory. If she sounded strange and messy, it was because anyone in her cinematic shoes would. As the girl torn between a passionate gangster (a terrific Shiney Ahuja) and a gooey-eyed singer (Emraan Hashmi), she becomes the naïve face – and jittery voice – of toxicity. Her heightened emotions fit perfectly into the cold, blue, gloomy winter of Seoul, giving this performance a thematic edge over her next, Woh Lamhe. Mohit Suri’s film, based on the late Parveen Babi’s stormy equation with Mahesh Bhatt, converted Ranaut into a genre she couldn’t escape for the foreseeable future.
