`Slumgdog Millionaire`

"Slumgdog Millionaire" (`SM`) is the talk of the town right now, not all of it complimentary, having won 4 Golden Globes and been nominated for the Oscars in 10 categories, of which the 3 that count most are for Best Film, Best Direction and Best Adapted Screenplay. It also opened in India yesterday and continues to arouse controversy, both there and here, with the e-waves buzzing with blogs and exchanges, many of them highly critical. So here is a collection of my thoughts, extrapolated (and edited) from my recent writings elsewhere:

We mustn`t forget that the film is based on a book,"Q&A", a novel by Vikas Swaroop. Swaroop is a senior career Indian diplomat, currently Deputy Indian High Commissioner to South Africa. He wrote it in 2003-04 (while he was posted to the IHC in London), and its film rights were taken up even before the book was published (because the powers that be clearly recognized its quality and potential). Danny Boyle, who directed the movie, is one of the new breed of British filmmakers who came into pominence with his `Trainspotting`, and the earlier `Shallow Graves` which I had thoroughly enjoyed at the time. The title `Slumdog Millionaire` came with the film right deal, but as Swaroop said on BBC Radio 5 on Sunday 4 January, he was quite happy with that and the fact that the story line changed to accommodate the movie project, which he recognized is a different medium that involves a whole lot of other and different issues and considerations.
"Q&A" was dramatised on radio in 2007 (I mentioned it in my annual review of that year); that version was a more faithful adaptation of the book than the film which, though it adheres to the basic theme and structure of the original, takes a large dose of cinematic licence in the form of the romance between the hero Jamal (played by Dev Patel, British born son of ex-Kenya Asian parents) and his childhood sweetheart Latika (played by the Indian Freida Pinto); indeed all the rest of the cast were Indian. Boyle has been saying that he had looked in vain for an Indian actor to play Jamal also, but found none who was physically suitable for the part.

Swaroop said the idea of the plot had come to him when there was a scandal involving a participant in our `How to be a Millinaire` who was accused (and I think convicted) of cheating. So he translated that into an Indian setting, except that unlike the British case, where the person concerned was an educated middle-class type, his hero was going to be an unsophisticated youth with no formal education who was engaged in the perennial struggle for survival in the mean streets of Mumbai, but who was able to answer the quiz questions by reference to the knowledge and wisdom he had acquired through his life`s experiences.

There is no denying that SM`s portrayal of Mumbai`s underbelly, of its underclass of slum dwellers, and its culture of low level life, is absolutely briilliant, as is the photography. The idea of the tv game show is of course an accepted part of the Indian entertainment scene. And so the basic plot line worked; how it did is something best left to your judgment.

SM is a British, not an Indian, production, though of course it is about India - set in India, with Indian characters and an essentially Indian story. It is certainly not a Bollywood nor indeed a Hollywood movie. It cannot therefore be judged by traditional Indian standards. In this respect, it is not much different from `Gandhi` or `A Passage to India` - the first became a universal epic, the second based on a great work of literature made a significant contribution to an understanding of the Indo-British colonial dynamic. A common feature of these and other similar films is that the makers of them are empathetic to Indian perspectives.

SM is not a documentary either, but fiction. It is based on a book, by (as we have seen) an Indian writer, and while (as I have previously mentioned) the flim- makers have departed from the original script, the screen adaptation nevertheless stays true to its basic structure and theme. But even so, without a degree of verisimiltude, a work of art can fall flat. The `rags to riches` phenomenon is not new; to that extent it mirrors real life; only of course the exact circumstances and details may vary. Here it is the device of the `Who Wants to be a Millionaire` (WWM) that is employed. In other situations, it could be just a lottery win, or a fortuitous `find` of a bagful of cash or other valuables, that could transform someone`s life, or a fight with `baddies` resulting in the hero making off with their loot, or just sheer hard work and struggle against any number of odds, ranging from natural disasters, to beaurocracy to racial discrimination to competitors and rivals - the possibilities, both in real life and therefore in fiction are endless.

The WWM scenario in SM is really an artistic device. The story line was to link every question to an underlying experience that had taught the contestant a lesson that contained the answer or a clue to it which he was able to recall. And so it is through this means that we learn of the painful past and growing up of Salim, the hero. And what a damning indictment of Indian society that was - damning but realistic. I won`t go into the details here because these have been amply dissected and discussed widely. But to those who who have condemned Danny Boyle for showing the stark `underbelly` of Mumbai*s (and by implication India`s) poverty-ridden shanty towns with all the vices portrayed there, I would say, why be so squeamish, why turn a blind eye to them? Most of us are familiar with the ugly side(s) of India`s society, not just in terms of the deformed, disabled, desperate and disfigured beggars we see everywhere in India, but also of the general squalor, decay and deprivations that are part of the daily lives of literally millions of people there. As for scenes of violence, well, we have them in films about war (not just in the Western cinema, but also in Indian movies, eg. `Ashoka` and of course countless other standard Bollywood ones) or crime (eg. `Fargo`, or the most recent `No Country for Old Men` mentioned in my annual review for 2008).

What most Indian film-goers are used to seeing and want is sanitised treatment of all these issues in their films and tv soaps - full of song and dance, plastic romance and robotic characters, both good and bad. So it is `social realism` that seems to have offended critics of the film. Well, what SM does is to disabuse them of the aura of well-being associated with the standard Bollywood fare, though at the same time it fulfils the promise of a `feel-good` movie. If people found the scenes of gritty realism, and of the culture of corruption and criminality, and of the misery and general decay all around in the streets and slums of Mumbai to be upsetting then that is how the subject was treated in the book - if anything even more toughly. Paradoxically however, though at first it appeared as if this was a `feel-bad` movie, once the story unrolled and the mystery unravelled, it was transformed into a `feel-good` one as the hero managed to win the ultimate prize against all odds and expectations. Even so, how can anyone deny that below the glitter of Mumbai, there is a huge underbelly of poverty and deprivation, of literally hundreds of thousands of people living, working, travelling, just existing, cheek-by-jowl? As Danny Boyle has said, what he was most impressed by was that yes, there was poverty, but not of the `abject` kind (that being the epithet normally applied to the term), but rather that the people of Mumbai (and presumably of India generally) are resilient, enterprising and philsophical.

The flashbacks in the narrative add a touch of suspense and thrill, and unfold the story leading to the hero`s trial by ordeal in the WWM hot seat, very effectively. The endpiece, the proverbial Bollywood number on the station platform, was the right note to end the film on, after the dramatic climax of the hero`s passing the gruelling tests both of the contest itself and of the torture at the hands of the police.

A R Rahman`s music was superb; my only regret and complaint is that its sound level in our multiplex cinema auditorium was so loud (as it usually is, with deafening crescedoes) that I wasn`t able to enjoy its micro-nuanced effect - I suppose it is best heard on a CD. It reminded me of other movies where Indian classical or semi-classical themes have been incorporated into their sound tracks, eg. Satyajit Ray`s `Pather Panchali` and a certain sequence in `Bullitt` (starring Steve McQueen), both of which contained jazzy compositions by Ravi Shankar.

Some people have even criticised Boyle`s casting of Indian actors, but can we not imagine what the reaction would have been if he had used only (white) British ones? Incidentally, apparently Amitabh Bhachan has not been happy with SM`s commercial and critical success, but he of course has an axe to grind here (he was the first anchor of the Indian WWM show, but then was overshadowed by his successor Shah Rukh Khan who made an even bigger success of it) - he would have been an invidious choice for the film, where he is an invisible presence in one scene! And are the Indian commentators rattled because SM is not an Indian but a British production? But then it was the same when `Gandhi` was made - if the Indians were capable of producing a world-class film biopic of Gandhi at that time, then they should have done it, but it did not happen. There was a carping critique of the film by Alice Miles in The Times on 14 January 2009 in which she accused cinemagoers of pornographic voyeurism (?) and of Boyle`s "forestalling potential criticism about another country`s horror as entertainment by employing many Indian actors" , and alleged, contrary to fact, that "(m)uch of the dialogue is in Hindi"!

Be that as it may, the broader appeal of the film is that it is the culmination of a process that had already begun, of bringing Indian culture into the public imagination here in the west. Not just Bollywood, Indian fashion and tourism, outsourced IT software networks, global Indian corporate activities, Indian diasporan interactions but also great contemporary Indian or Indiasporan literary figures (Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy, Rohinton Mistry, V S Naipaul, Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Desai et al - all these have been steadily making an impact on British and American consciousness, now heightened by the recent attack on Mumbai and its landmark Taj Mahaj Palace Hotel. SM will prove to be an icing on the cake. It is exciting and energizing, pulsating with sound and sight. Freida and Dev, both young, pretty/handsome, and personable, make a romantic couple worthy of any make-believe, feel-good scenario and the final scene, though it is in the classic Bollywood glitzy genre, will surely resonate with audiences as a lasting impression. It thorughly deserved the four Golden Globes and now, even one or two Oscars!

RAMNIK SHAH
Surrey England