Slumdog Millionaire

The poster of Slumdog Millionaire reads: What does it take to find a lost love? Money? Luck? Smarts? Destiny?

Now how the hell one distinguishes between Luck and Destiny. Come to think of it even ‘Money’ gets mixed up with these two options. And then you find yourself crying for a fifth option, ‘None of the above’. Oh! forget the details. Just get on with it.

In more than one interview, the director of the film, Danny Boyle has quoted the great British director David Lean’s approach on how to open a film – he says, the first five minutes must establish the ambition of your movie (explains the opening energy in Slumdog Millionaire while running around the slums in Mumbai). I am thinking of Lean’s own tryst with India in adapting E.M Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’. It is said that Satyajit Ray had twice approached Forster for the rights of his book. But the erudite Cambridge Don (also a racist and incidentally gay) would not part with it. And then Lean was granted the rights and he made the film. Satyajit Ray in his review of the film said he liked Lean’s work but for couple of mislaid details in casting (I suspect, Alec Guniess playing a Hindu priest), props and architecture that were not true to the context and setting.

I am no Ray, but Lean’s follower Boyle surely is a disaster on counts of details. As someone who saw the film late in the day, you are aware of the views in the public domain and the recognition the film has got. The press is gaga over the film and indeed the fact that the film has been nominated for 10 Oscars (results in another few hours!) and has already bagged no less than other 62 wins and 27 nominations! The imdb users have voted the film at number 34 among the top 250 films of all times!

All these for a film that has not gotten right that teenaged kids from Mumbai chawls do not have a British twang when they speak English (if at all). That gangsters would not know the inventor of the gun just because they have used it, the blind beggars will not care or recollect whose mug features on an American dollar bill just because he has been tipped with one and surely they are not going to know that a particular song has been sung by the 15th century poet Surdas because the song is NOT Surdas’ to start with (it is by a Bollywood lyricist from the 1950s). A sequence has a gangster asking his mistress to ‘fix me a sandwich’, when he should have ordered for daal, biryani or some such. Still if I were to pick one flaw it would have to be the language and how it was spoken in the film. For nearly two third of the film’s run, one feels being held in a pincer grip and taken on cheese-grater ride. One can see why this film might work better in subtitles especially for non-Indian audience (but that’s pulling a fast one on ‘em).

There are things going for the film. The film’s set up and the structure is most inviting – here is a reality show where with each question a most unlikely winner will inch towards winning a fortune. And for each question we get to have ‘juicy’ insights into the protagonist’s back story that involves love, sex, violence, hatred, the underworld, and even class wars. The film starts well – the first two episodes – when Jamal tells how he answered the (easy) questions on a superstar and a Hindu god – are the most (and the only) interesting parts of the film. Some have thought that these two episodes show India in poor light; I for one only wanted more of these – scenes that had both novelty and (social) significance. Unfortunately, the film meanders and dips from here on. As the reality show questions become more difficult, the plausibility of how Jamal found the answers becomes more suspect. There is a long detour (surely for the tourist-minded) when the film takes us away from Bombay to visit Taj Mahal in Agra that has no connection to how Jamal got a question right.

The film is a result of brisk direction and has several inspired moments (that’s about it. Boyle’s Trainspotting? Yes, any day). There is some good acting especially by child actors (and by Anil Kapoor, host of the reality show; it is embarrassing to see that the actors who are hogging the limelight are not the ones who were the best in the film) and a sound design that props up the flagging film through out. The cinematography has been used with cunning to particularly ‘block out’ the ‘details’ – a great service for a film doing so poorly on this count.

The best aspect of Slumdog Millionaire is that Danny boy has seen us to and possibly through the Oscars… when a series of our home-bred filmmakers and stars failed to do so despite trying very very hard (with equally inferior films). I am keeping my fingers crossed for Gulzar. It will be a little ironical that Gulzaar gets an Oscar nod for one of his lesser works but I am hoping that it will be a satisfying recognition for Bollywood’s poet-lyricist par excellence.

Anyhow, I went to salute the master, came out envying Danny Boyle. JAI HO!

(first published in passionforcinema: http://passionforcinema.com/author/padmaja/)