On Slumdog Millionaire
When Debbie and I walked back from the theatre, snow falling around us with a rare heaviness, we finally found the right word to describe the film: magical. It is magical in its art direction – the production team took an idea and somehow transformed imagined images into a colorful, dizzying physical reality. The film is magical in its affect on audience members – you leave the theatre with a genuine, genuine smile on your face and see that expression reflected on the faces of everyone around you, including those with whom you would otherwise feel little kinship. It is magical in that it is a hit with American audiences – even though it is set in a Mumbai slum, a good chunk of the dialogue is in Hindi with English subtitles, and the raw realities of a child’s slum life are far from edited out.
Some questions the movie left me with:
Can you really love with someone who is largely a childhood memory; someone who is not in your present? Is that love or is that nostalgia?
Can you forgive a character who has committed rape just because the director asks you to forgive him? Can you forgive rape?
Left with no options, can a child raise himself? Can siblings raise each other?
Some images the film left me with:
The sight of Lathika (played by the absolutely stunning Freida Pinto) awaiting her future on a train station platform, a beaded canary-yellow scarf wrapped around her head; one the film’s most stylistic moments.
The sight of young Jamal and Salim’s dirt-streaked faces.
The bird’s eye view shots of congested traffic on Indian roads.
Slumdog Millionaire makes you want to drop everything and explore India. I feel like India is a place many young Americans, myself included, simply long to see. It’s almost as if we expect to go and immediately our senses will be drowned in sound and smell and meaning; we expect that by simple osmosis the spiritual truths of life will wash over us upon landing. ( As one participant in Where There Be Dragons’ Visions of India semester program states, “Banaras (Varanasi, in India) has a way of prying your eyelids open whether you want them that way or not. Upon arrival, we were assaulted by truth - the truths of the world as seen in a raw and unfiltered light.”) Many young, educated Americans – I think – wish to go to the continent of Africa in order to do; but with India, the focus is more on seeing, feeling, absorbing into your person.
Here’s some of what the Times had to say on the film:
“Slumdog” is decidedly not Bollywood in one crucial respect: It was shot on the streets of Mumbai, from the dense warrens of a tin-roofed shantytown to a red-light district to the architectural landmark Victoria Terminus train station. Most Bollywood filmmakers do not shoot on the streets of the city — they recreate it in studios or they choose to shoot in more exotic locales (Brooklyn, for instance) — because that way, as the “Slumdog” crew learned, lies a certain madness.
Whatever you call it, Mumbai or Bombay is not a city that can be manufactured on a set, Mr. Boyle [the director] maintained. It is not distinguished by its architecture, but by its atmosphere, its noise. “Slumdog Millionaire” captures all of that, though because it is a movie, it misses one thing that truly distinguishes Mumbai, the way it smells: part drying fish, part human waste.
