By Mayank Shekhar Posted On Saturday, January 24, 2009 at 02:20:44 AM FILM: Slumdog Millionaire DIRECTOR: Danny Boyle ACTORS: Dev Patel, Freida Pinto,Anil Kapoor, Irrfan Khan RATING: * * * 1/2
The rating is immaterial in this case. You may as well add or take away a couple of stars. I'm certain you will watch the film anyway. So you must. Few films have staked a claim to the Oscars right from their early reviews in the American press. By the time of its belated Indian release, three months after, Slumdog's place in history cannot be contested. If anything, its greatness opens for us a lively discussion. First off, yes, this is a film made primarily for the West. The Indian audience is merely a healthy bonus for its producers, coming from the rare Oscars and Globes' acclaim. This becomes quite clear right from the first scene where a young Dev Patel is whip-lashed at a dingy police station. He expresses pain in English with a fair British twang. Mainstream English-speaking film-goers across the world rarely watch movies either dubbed or sub-titled. An American studio was unlikely to fund a film in any other language. So much otherwise was falling into place for them. Who Wants To Be Millionaire, the quiz show the film is centred on, was a top-rated programme both on Indian and British/American television. Since Suketu Mehta's Maximum City or Arvind Adiga's White Tiger or the `India Shining' story, or even the recent terror attacks, Mumbai has been a subject of strong western interest. Local language may appear a minor matter. It takes on other meanings in this country. English is the firmest Indian marker for social mobility, much more than caste or class or religion. To an Indian audience, a slum-boy with such impeccable command over Queen's English is less likely to be a chaiwallah at a call-centre. He is more likely to be an entry-level executive in the same office. The boy bears a Muslim name Jamal Malik. In Vikas Swarup's book Q&A, the slum-boy is a secular Ram Mohamed Thomas. The relation between the said book and Simon Beaufoy's aromatic screenplay, I am told, is merely functional. Irrfan Khan, who plays a senior inspector interrogating the boy, tells him, "Money and women are two reasons to make mistakes in life. Looks like you're mixed up with both." He is. By a strange coincidence, Jamal is a round away from Rs 20 million on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. No one can fathom the source of his knowledge. Anil Kapoor plays the host, and his is the least explained character. I can't fathom why he can't stand the slum-boy's success either. The leaps of faith are gigantic. On his part, the director throws in a song-and-dance at the end to explain the emotional picture experience Bollywood films are meant to be. Jamal's life, on the other hand, has been an expedition in search of his childhood sweetheart. His furious adventures take him from the slums to a ruthless beggar home, among hoods in Agra, and back at a road-side restaurant in Mumbai. He is most convincing as a little child (Ayush Khedekar) who loses his mother to the `92 Hindu-Muslim riots. Sure, the film is an expression of poverty and crime and racial and class divides that rich, insular Indians shy away from discussing too often. They feel unfairly clubbed with millions of Indian-poor when such books or films become popular abroad. There is fair exaggeration. Yet, it'd be unfair to sense any western bias. If anything, Slumdog is a far more entertaining film than last year's Italian Cannes-winner Gomorra, set in the slums or ghettos of Naples. The reason we may love this film is possibly because of Danny Boyle alone. Boyle (Beach, Trainspotting) treats the screenplay to the same technical chops and mastery over movie-making that you expect from the finest in the world. The visual experience is neatly exhilarating; almost every shot a series of stills worth being framed forever. The setting is still familiar, though the hopeful and humane eyes are an outsider's. Rio has its City Of God; Johannesburg, its Tsotsi. This is the closest Mumbai has reached there since Satya (1998). So what if it took Boyle to do it. It is no one's fault, least of all the West's, that the most acclaimed "realistic filmmaker" in Bollywood working on similar themes is Madhur Bhandarkar. http://www.mumbaimirror.com/article/30/2009012420090124022044406d8280eb/Jai-who-and-how
