A Hollow Message of Social Justice
Slumdog Millionaire's Dehumanizing View of India's Poor
By MITU SENGUPTA
Counterpunch
February 20, 2009
Slumdog Millionaire, one of the most celebrated films of recent times, tells the rags-to-rajah story of a love-struck boy, Jamal, who, with a little help from “destiny,” triumphs over his wretched beginnings in Mumbai’s squalid slums. Riding on a wave of rave reviews, Slumdog is now poised to win Hollywood’s highest tribute, the Academy Award for Best Picture. This honour could add some US$100 million to Slumdog’s box-office revenues, as Oscar wins usually do. But it will also enhance the film’s already-robust reputation as an authentic representation of the lives of India’s urban poor. So far, most of the awards collected by the film have been accepted in the name of “the children,” suggesting that its own cast is promoting it not as an entertaining, cinematically spectacular work of fiction, which it is, but as a powerful tool of advocacy. Nothing could be more worrying, as Slumdog, despite all hype to the contrary, delivers a disempowering narrative about the poor that renders hollow its apparent message of social justice.
Many Indians are angered by Slumdog because it tarnishes their country’s image as a rising economic power and beacon of democracy. While understandable, this is not defensible. Though at times embarrassingly contrived, most of the film’s heartrending scenarios reflect a sad, but well-documented reality. Torture is not unheard of among the police, though none is surely dim enough to target an articulate man who is also a rising media phenomenon. Beggar-makers do round-up abandoned children and mutilate them to make them more sympathetic, though such a child will unlikely ever chance upon a $100 bill, much less be capable of identifying it by touch alone.
If anything, Boyle’s magical tale, with its unconvincing one-dimensional characters and absurd plot devices, understates the depth of suffering among India’s poor. It is impossible, for example, that Jamal would emerge from his ravaged life with a dewy complexion and upper-class accent. The real problem with Slumdog, however, is not its shallow portrayal of poverty, but its minimizing of the capabilities and even basic humanity of those it claims to speak for.
It is no secret that Slumdog is meant to reflect life in Dharavi, the vast sprawl of slums at the heart of Mumbai. The film depicts Dharavi as a feral wasteland, with little evidence of order, community or compassion. Other than the children, the no-one is even remotely well-intentioned. Hustlers and petty warlords run amok, and even Jamal’s schoolteacher is inexplicably callous. This is a place of sheer evil and decay.
But nothing is further from the truth. Dharavi teems with dynamism, and is a hub of small-scale industries, whose estimated annual turnover is between US$50 to $100 million. Nor is Dharavi bereft of governing structures and productive social relations. Residents have built strong collaborative networks, often across potentially volatile lines of caste and religion. Many cooperative societies work together with NGOs to provide residents with essential services such as basic healthcare, schooling and waste disposal, often compensating for the formal government’s woeful inadequacy in meeting their needs. Although these under-resourced organizations have touched only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, their efforts must be acknowledged, along with the fact that slum-dwellers, despite their grinding poverty, have lives of value and dignity, and a resourcefulness that stretches far beyond the haphazard, individualistic survival-of-the-fittest sort shown in Slumdog.
In the end, Slumdog presents a profoundly dehumanizing view of the poor, with all its troubling political implications. Since there are no internal resources, and none capable of constructive voice or action, all “solutions” must arrive externally. After a harrowing life in an anarchic wilderness, salvation finally comes to Jamal in the form of an imported quiz-show, which he succeeds in thanks only to “destiny.” Must other unfortunates, like the stoic Jamal, patiently await their own destinies of rescue by a foreign hand? While this self-billed “feel good movie of the year” may help us “feel good” that we are among the lucky ones on earth, it delivers a patronizing, colonial and ultimately sham statement on social justice for those who are not.
Mitu Sengupta, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics & Public Administration at Ryerson University in Toronto. She can be reached at mitu.sengupta@gmail.com
-----------------------------------------------------
An idiots' guide to India
Hirsh Sawhney
Guardian
Saturday 21 February
When India's call centres and booming economy began to grab headlines, writers and filmmakers attempted to woo western audiences with tales from the subcontinent. Some of these works were nuanced and sophisticated, like Richie Mehta's recent film Amal or Suketu Mehta's bestselling book Maximum City. But many of them were designed to cash in on the India craze and provide digestible titbits about the country's culture and history to western audiences – India for idiots, if you will.
Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, the runaway favourite for the best picture Oscar tomorrow night, is precisely one of these simplistic texts. It contains a smattering of all the major Indian hot buttons: call centres, religious riots, urban development, sex workers, the Taj Mahal –and, of course, slums.
The film, which traces the life of Jamal Malik from the devastatingly poor streets of Mumbai to his deliverance on the TV game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire, has elicited some furious reactions in India. Many have pointed out that the slum children Boyle used as actors weren't fairly compensated for their performances. A group of protestors in the city of Patna burned Slumdog posters and ransacked a theatre where the film was being screened, claiming that film's depiction of slum dwellers was a "violation of human rights." Some Indian commentators insinuated that the movie has been successful in the west because uses "poverty porn" to "titillate foreign audiences".
At the other end of the spectrum, Slumdog's admirers assert that those who whine about the film are guilty of "patriotic indignation" and lack "genuine anger and concern" about India's horrific poverty. Fans not only find the film upbeat, colourful and entertaining, they also applaud the fact that it sheds light on the state of slums. The Indian romance novelist Shobhaa De claimed that it has taken an outsider like Boyle "to go fearlessly into 'No Man's Land' and hold up a mirror to our sordid society…"
Yes, Boyle deserves a pat on the back for diving into Mumbai's entrails and drawing attention to its poverty. But it's a mistake to label him original for shedding light on India's underbelly. Before him, scores of filmmakers – from the iconic Guru Dutt to today's Madhu Bhandarkar – have decried inequity and portrayed India honestly, warts and all. The legendary Raj Kapoor even employed a mixture of fantasy and realism that pre-dates Boyle's masala formula for cinematic success.
But it's also clear that Boyle's version of the third world, complete with fetidness and depravity, is particularly gratifying to our UK and US sensibilities. Why? Because it grossly oversimplifies poverty and our relationship with it.
After watching the film, viewers are left to infer that slums are horrid, rancid places because of beggar masters, Hindu zealots and Muslim gangs. Of course these forces play their role in perpetuating misery. But in reality, slums are an international problem caused by an intricate set of entities: corrupt government officials, gargantuan multinational corporations and suspect IMF structural adjustment programs.
Playing it safe, Boyle doesn't implicate any of these entities. As a result, his movie does allow us to believe that we have been responsible global citizens by engaging with the intensity of third world slums. We in the audience even feel genuine sympathy for destitution. But at no point do we have to forsake the delusion that abject poverty and inequity are strictly foreign things for which we share no culpability.
In fact, far from spreading the blame for global poverty, Boyle's film actually suggests that the west is the solution to India's problems. Protagonist Jamal only escapes his ceaseless cycle of squalor and crime once he makes it into the orderly, democratic world of a British call centre. This call centre, in turn, delivers him to his fateful redemption on Millionaire. The subtext is clear: things are really bad in urban India but healthy servings of western values are just what the doctor - and the Academy judges - ordered.
Of course, many relish this action-packed fairy tale. It reinforces the notion that our policies and mindsets are righteous and can rid the world of its troubles. Stories that perpetuate this myth are especially appealing right now. In the wake of a grave economic collapse and a wretched, unending war, we have to begin the painful process of questioning the integrity of our way of life. A movie like Slumdog allows us to put that off for a few more minutes.
------
Its particularly interesting to read the Many self righteous British people's comments to this article refuting it. Here is a sample
* peterNW1
21 Feb 09, 9:24am
Danny Boyle has taken a novel by an Indian writer, Vikas Swarup, and has filmed it with an Indian cast and crew - in India. If Danny was Indian, Hirsh Sawhney would be celebrating his success. But Danny is a Brit (of Irish descent) and therefore has to be condemned as a colonial exploiter. Pathetic.
* guardianreeda
21 Feb 09, 9:24am
Silly me: there was I watching a story about 'slum guy gets well paid job', when all the while Danny Boyles sickening western-imperialist subtext passed me me by.
Is he a racist too? (Just want to check)
Thank you thought police. I'm so grateful for opening my eyes.
* thetrashheap
21 Feb 09, 9:27am
India is a hugely overpopulated, country with a deeply bigoted caste system. These are the two biggest factors in it's poverty. India has a space program and nukes but slums.
I don't buy into the hype about how great the India boom is when they seem to care so little for the poverty stricken in their country but neither do I accept this is all our fault.
Showing posts with label slumdog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label slumdog. Show all posts
Monday, March 2, 2009
'Slumdog' sacrifices Indian pride
An excellent article - hat tip to shadowarrior.
Sat, Feb 28, 2009
Irish Times
Danny Boyle’s film wallows in tired cliches of abysmal poverty and mindless villainy, writes PRIYA RAJSEKAR.
IT WAS no movie for the little boy transported from the slums of Mumbai to the glamorous red carpet at the Oscars. On a platform that makes even veterans weak in the knees, this boy who on a normal day deems a borrowed tarpaulin sheet his home, stood unwavering in his designer dinner jacket, dignified smile in place, as he thanked the people who had made this journey possible.
Yet, in the movie that swept the Oscars, he and his poverty-ridden friends are seen devoid of any dignity and pride – as slum “dogs”, a different species inhabiting a different world.
The mood of the moment is one of exhilaration, not just for those involved in the making of the movie, but also for Indians, worldwide. This despite the fact that it has taken this cultural treasure trove with more than a billion people over 80 years to get this far, and that too with a great deal of hand-holding by a British filmmaker.
Going by the media frenzy in India this week, it would seem a Bollywood movie won the award. There is great pride, hope and a sense of having arrived on the global cinema scene, with three of the eight Oscars won by Indians. Yet, in many Indian minds, there is this nagging doubt that the journey to Oscar glory may have exacted too high a price for India’s international image. Keeping with the spirit of the moment, even the sceptics are calm, cheering the winners on, but will the adulation last?
Targeted at a western audience that has always loved fairytales with happy endings, Slumdog Millionair e is just what the doctor ordered for the recession. For a hardcore movie fan, the over-hyped squalor and violence, the impeccable British accent of an unschooled teenager and even the hero’s improbable feat is merely the suspension of disbelief. But, for the average Indian, and the average Indian emigrant, the liberal use of stereotypes rankles. It is difficult not to squirm when, seated with a western audience, one witnesses the graphic portrayals of abuse and poverty, as though India has little else to offer. Given that India now makes more movies than Hollywood and that every year it has religiously sent in its Oscar hopefuls, many brilliant, and I dare say far better than Slumdog Millionaire, it is rather ironic that a non-Indian’s depiction of life in India is more palatable to the world than an all-Indian creation.
There are many obvious reasons why the movie is regarded a masterpiece.
However, if one has read the original novel, Q & A , by Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup, it is hard to ignore certain deliberate and strategic changes. Why has the name of the protagonist, a secular Ram Mohammed Thomas, been changed into an easily identifiable Muslim name, Jamal Malik? Why not a Hindu name to go with the Hindu-dominated country? Were the repercussions of Hindu-Muslim tensions so relevant to the central theme of the movie? Then again, the novel itself is not so rooted in the slums and there is far less of an effort to draw attention to the sword-wielding Hindu fundamentalist.
In truth, about 65 million Indians live in slums around India and this includes migrants from neighbouring countries. It is a sad reality, and undoubtedly something to be moved by and ashamed of. But, taken in the context of a billion Indians, it is easy to see that India has a lot more to it than abysmal poverty and mindless villainy that the movie uses as a leitmotif.
Sudheer Mishra, a popular Indian director of the critically acclaimed movie Dharavi, named after Asia’s largest slum, had an interesting anecdote to narrate on the subject of stereotyping.
After an interview with him soon after the release of Dharavi, the foreign TV crew he’d been with went on to shoot the inside of a slumdweller’s hut. The rolling cameras were abruptly halted, however, the minute the crew realised the hut was equipped with a television set.
Sure, Slumdog Millionaire is a little better than the usual association with “turbaned”, wrinkly snake charmers and elephants lazing across the roads but doesn’t a country with leading space technology, nuclear power and IT excellence deserve more?
As an unsolicited exercise in defamation, even as it warms the heart and lifts the human spirit in true fairytale style, it wilfully discourages the average tourist to India, for whom the graphic, stark images of misery will easily overwhelm any painstakingly made holiday brochure. The boy covered in human waste epitomising the slumdweller’s spirit may attract the moviegoer but will without doubt keep at bay any kind of inward investment that will bail the slumdweller out.
It should not be forgotten that in the beginning, Vasco da Gama and even Christopher Columbus had originally set out to find not “slum” India, but the El Dorado that India was.
Director Danny Boyle’s tributes to the Mumbai spirit and the Indian artists in the movie has been generous. His career and those of the lucky winners will be star-studded. And as the flavour of the season, Bollywood itself is living its own “Bollywood dream” at the moment – of making it big in Hollywood.
But for the little Indian “slumdogs” who have given the movie its soul, this is a fleeting moment. For when the clock strikes midnight, these people who have helped create many millionaires around the world will return to their tarpaulin-roof homes, to take their usual place beside their colleagues, too proud and too dignified to “ask for more”. City of Joy has done little for Kolkatta (Calcutta), and Slumdog Millionaire will do little for Dharavi.
As for the price for the prize, it is quite evident the underdogs have paid up.
Priya Rajsekar is a freelance journalist from Tamil Nadu state in southern India. She has been living in Ireland for 10 years.
See also:
------------------
The Times (UK)
January 14, 2009
Shocked by Slumdog's poverty porn
Danny Boyle's film is sweeping up awards, but it's wrong to revel in the misery of India's children
Alice Miles
There are many reasons why you might want to see Slumdog Millionaire - it is directed by the brilliant Danny Boyle, it is set in the sensual feast that is Mumbai and it has won awards for music, directing and acting. And then there is the fact that critics and its own publicity have branded it a feel-good movie. Call me shallow, but that ultimately swung it for me.
A few hours later I was wincing in my seat. The film opens with a scene of horrible violence: a man hanging from the ceiling of a police station, being tortured to unconsciousness, a trickle of blood running from his mouth. It moves swiftly into scenes of utter misery and depravity, in which small starving children are beaten, mutilated and perverted.
Mothers die horribly in front of their sons, small girls are turned into prostitutes, small boys into beggars. I hope it won't spoil the feel-good surprise if I tell you that one particularly sadistic scene shows a young boy having his eyes burnt out with acid to maximise the profits of street begging. Charities working with street children in India seem unaware of any instances of this, although Save the Children emphasises that similar violence against children by beggar mafia is well documented.
The film is brilliant, horrifying, compelling and awful, the relentless violence leavened only by an occasional clip of someone working his way through the questions on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?. You might want to look away, but you can't and, despite the banal storyline, I can see why it is pulling in the awards.
Yet the film is vile. Unlike other Boyle films such as Trainspotting or Shallow Grave, which also revel in a fantastical comic violence, Slumdog Millionaire is about children. And it is set not in the West but in the slums of the Third World. As the film revels in the violence, degradation and horror, it invites you, the Westerner, to enjoy it, too. Will they find it such fun in Mumbai?
Like the bestselling novel by the Americanised Afghan Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Slumdog Millionaire is not a million miles away from a form of pornographic voyeurism. A Thousand Splendid Suns is obsessed with rape and violence against women, the reader asked to pore over every last horrible detail. Slumdog Millionaire is poverty porn.
Here is the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) summary of the film. It judged it suitable for viewers aged 15 or over (I would add another ten to that): “Strong violence is seen in a scene where a group of Muslims are attacked and killed in the street - together with general chaos and beatings, there are some stronger and more explicit moments, such as the deliberate setting of a man on fire... We also later see strong violence that includes a knife held to a woman's throat as she's forcibly snatched off the street, an impressionistic blinding of a young beggar boy, and torture by electricity in a police station. The BBFC has placed this work in the COMEDY genre.”
Comedy? So maybe that's it: I just didn't get the joke.
I wonder if India will, or whether, as with Aravind Adiga's Man Booker prize-winning novel, The White Tiger, people will feel more ambivalent than in the West. An editorial in dnaindia.com, a Mumbai-based online newspaper, read: “The miserable existence of the average slum dweller, which we in India know so well, is novel to the Western viewer... The awarding of the Booker Prize to The White Tiger shows that the seamier side of the Indian dream continues to have a resonance in Western sensibilities. The White Tiger's victory left many Indians underwhelmed; who is to say that when Indian audiences finally see Slumdog they will not be equally put off?”
As a review on the same website by Vrinda Nabar, an Indian professor at a US university, put it: “Slumdog's eventual victory comes at a price. When the selective manipulation of Third World squalor can make for a feel-good movie in a dismal year, the global village has a long way to go.”
Quite. The Mumbai Mirror dubbed it “Slum Chic”, and notes that the term “slumdog” is not widely recognised in India: “It appears to be a British invention to describe a poor Dharavi kid in a derogatory way.”
I am being highly selective: mostly, India seems in thrall to the brilliance of Slumdog and how it has put Mumbai and Bollywood on the map.
That said, most Indians have not seen the film, because it will not open there until next week, a delay that has raised an eyebrow or two: did Mumbai not deserve to see Slumdog first? Instead, pirated copies are doing the rounds while America watches a film that Hollywood refused to fund, because “who wants to see misery and street kids?”.
Boyle describes the film as “very subversive”. He has forestalled potential criticism about plundering another country's horror as entertainment by employing many Indian actors, including Bollywood stars and an Indian composer. Much of the dialogue is in Hindi.
And it may be that the brilliance of the film rescues Boyle from criticism: he is a film-maker, not a social commentator, and nobody doubts its cinematic brilliance. As The New York Times put it: “It's hard to hold on to any reservations in the face of Mr Boyle's resolutely upbeat pitch and seductive visual style.”
That very seductiveness is the problem. But if Boyle may be absolved from criticism, I am not sure the same can be said of the audience. “Slumderful!” declared the New York Post. When we are suckered into enjoying scenes of absolute horror among children in slums on the other side of the world, even dubbing them comedy, we ought to question where our moral compass is pointing. Boyle's most subversive achievement may lie not in revealing the dark underbelly of India - but in revealing ours.
Sat, Feb 28, 2009
Irish Times
Danny Boyle’s film wallows in tired cliches of abysmal poverty and mindless villainy, writes PRIYA RAJSEKAR.
IT WAS no movie for the little boy transported from the slums of Mumbai to the glamorous red carpet at the Oscars. On a platform that makes even veterans weak in the knees, this boy who on a normal day deems a borrowed tarpaulin sheet his home, stood unwavering in his designer dinner jacket, dignified smile in place, as he thanked the people who had made this journey possible.
Yet, in the movie that swept the Oscars, he and his poverty-ridden friends are seen devoid of any dignity and pride – as slum “dogs”, a different species inhabiting a different world.
The mood of the moment is one of exhilaration, not just for those involved in the making of the movie, but also for Indians, worldwide. This despite the fact that it has taken this cultural treasure trove with more than a billion people over 80 years to get this far, and that too with a great deal of hand-holding by a British filmmaker.
Going by the media frenzy in India this week, it would seem a Bollywood movie won the award. There is great pride, hope and a sense of having arrived on the global cinema scene, with three of the eight Oscars won by Indians. Yet, in many Indian minds, there is this nagging doubt that the journey to Oscar glory may have exacted too high a price for India’s international image. Keeping with the spirit of the moment, even the sceptics are calm, cheering the winners on, but will the adulation last?
Targeted at a western audience that has always loved fairytales with happy endings, Slumdog Millionair e is just what the doctor ordered for the recession. For a hardcore movie fan, the over-hyped squalor and violence, the impeccable British accent of an unschooled teenager and even the hero’s improbable feat is merely the suspension of disbelief. But, for the average Indian, and the average Indian emigrant, the liberal use of stereotypes rankles. It is difficult not to squirm when, seated with a western audience, one witnesses the graphic portrayals of abuse and poverty, as though India has little else to offer. Given that India now makes more movies than Hollywood and that every year it has religiously sent in its Oscar hopefuls, many brilliant, and I dare say far better than Slumdog Millionaire, it is rather ironic that a non-Indian’s depiction of life in India is more palatable to the world than an all-Indian creation.
There are many obvious reasons why the movie is regarded a masterpiece.
However, if one has read the original novel, Q & A , by Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup, it is hard to ignore certain deliberate and strategic changes. Why has the name of the protagonist, a secular Ram Mohammed Thomas, been changed into an easily identifiable Muslim name, Jamal Malik? Why not a Hindu name to go with the Hindu-dominated country? Were the repercussions of Hindu-Muslim tensions so relevant to the central theme of the movie? Then again, the novel itself is not so rooted in the slums and there is far less of an effort to draw attention to the sword-wielding Hindu fundamentalist.
In truth, about 65 million Indians live in slums around India and this includes migrants from neighbouring countries. It is a sad reality, and undoubtedly something to be moved by and ashamed of. But, taken in the context of a billion Indians, it is easy to see that India has a lot more to it than abysmal poverty and mindless villainy that the movie uses as a leitmotif.
Sudheer Mishra, a popular Indian director of the critically acclaimed movie Dharavi, named after Asia’s largest slum, had an interesting anecdote to narrate on the subject of stereotyping.
After an interview with him soon after the release of Dharavi, the foreign TV crew he’d been with went on to shoot the inside of a slumdweller’s hut. The rolling cameras were abruptly halted, however, the minute the crew realised the hut was equipped with a television set.
Sure, Slumdog Millionaire is a little better than the usual association with “turbaned”, wrinkly snake charmers and elephants lazing across the roads but doesn’t a country with leading space technology, nuclear power and IT excellence deserve more?
As an unsolicited exercise in defamation, even as it warms the heart and lifts the human spirit in true fairytale style, it wilfully discourages the average tourist to India, for whom the graphic, stark images of misery will easily overwhelm any painstakingly made holiday brochure. The boy covered in human waste epitomising the slumdweller’s spirit may attract the moviegoer but will without doubt keep at bay any kind of inward investment that will bail the slumdweller out.
It should not be forgotten that in the beginning, Vasco da Gama and even Christopher Columbus had originally set out to find not “slum” India, but the El Dorado that India was.
Director Danny Boyle’s tributes to the Mumbai spirit and the Indian artists in the movie has been generous. His career and those of the lucky winners will be star-studded. And as the flavour of the season, Bollywood itself is living its own “Bollywood dream” at the moment – of making it big in Hollywood.
But for the little Indian “slumdogs” who have given the movie its soul, this is a fleeting moment. For when the clock strikes midnight, these people who have helped create many millionaires around the world will return to their tarpaulin-roof homes, to take their usual place beside their colleagues, too proud and too dignified to “ask for more”. City of Joy has done little for Kolkatta (Calcutta), and Slumdog Millionaire will do little for Dharavi.
As for the price for the prize, it is quite evident the underdogs have paid up.
Priya Rajsekar is a freelance journalist from Tamil Nadu state in southern India. She has been living in Ireland for 10 years.
See also:
------------------
The Times (UK)
January 14, 2009
Shocked by Slumdog's poverty porn
Danny Boyle's film is sweeping up awards, but it's wrong to revel in the misery of India's children
Alice Miles
There are many reasons why you might want to see Slumdog Millionaire - it is directed by the brilliant Danny Boyle, it is set in the sensual feast that is Mumbai and it has won awards for music, directing and acting. And then there is the fact that critics and its own publicity have branded it a feel-good movie. Call me shallow, but that ultimately swung it for me.
A few hours later I was wincing in my seat. The film opens with a scene of horrible violence: a man hanging from the ceiling of a police station, being tortured to unconsciousness, a trickle of blood running from his mouth. It moves swiftly into scenes of utter misery and depravity, in which small starving children are beaten, mutilated and perverted.
Mothers die horribly in front of their sons, small girls are turned into prostitutes, small boys into beggars. I hope it won't spoil the feel-good surprise if I tell you that one particularly sadistic scene shows a young boy having his eyes burnt out with acid to maximise the profits of street begging. Charities working with street children in India seem unaware of any instances of this, although Save the Children emphasises that similar violence against children by beggar mafia is well documented.
The film is brilliant, horrifying, compelling and awful, the relentless violence leavened only by an occasional clip of someone working his way through the questions on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?. You might want to look away, but you can't and, despite the banal storyline, I can see why it is pulling in the awards.
Yet the film is vile. Unlike other Boyle films such as Trainspotting or Shallow Grave, which also revel in a fantastical comic violence, Slumdog Millionaire is about children. And it is set not in the West but in the slums of the Third World. As the film revels in the violence, degradation and horror, it invites you, the Westerner, to enjoy it, too. Will they find it such fun in Mumbai?
Like the bestselling novel by the Americanised Afghan Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Slumdog Millionaire is not a million miles away from a form of pornographic voyeurism. A Thousand Splendid Suns is obsessed with rape and violence against women, the reader asked to pore over every last horrible detail. Slumdog Millionaire is poverty porn.
Here is the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) summary of the film. It judged it suitable for viewers aged 15 or over (I would add another ten to that): “Strong violence is seen in a scene where a group of Muslims are attacked and killed in the street - together with general chaos and beatings, there are some stronger and more explicit moments, such as the deliberate setting of a man on fire... We also later see strong violence that includes a knife held to a woman's throat as she's forcibly snatched off the street, an impressionistic blinding of a young beggar boy, and torture by electricity in a police station. The BBFC has placed this work in the COMEDY genre.”
Comedy? So maybe that's it: I just didn't get the joke.
I wonder if India will, or whether, as with Aravind Adiga's Man Booker prize-winning novel, The White Tiger, people will feel more ambivalent than in the West. An editorial in dnaindia.com, a Mumbai-based online newspaper, read: “The miserable existence of the average slum dweller, which we in India know so well, is novel to the Western viewer... The awarding of the Booker Prize to The White Tiger shows that the seamier side of the Indian dream continues to have a resonance in Western sensibilities. The White Tiger's victory left many Indians underwhelmed; who is to say that when Indian audiences finally see Slumdog they will not be equally put off?”
As a review on the same website by Vrinda Nabar, an Indian professor at a US university, put it: “Slumdog's eventual victory comes at a price. When the selective manipulation of Third World squalor can make for a feel-good movie in a dismal year, the global village has a long way to go.”
Quite. The Mumbai Mirror dubbed it “Slum Chic”, and notes that the term “slumdog” is not widely recognised in India: “It appears to be a British invention to describe a poor Dharavi kid in a derogatory way.”
I am being highly selective: mostly, India seems in thrall to the brilliance of Slumdog and how it has put Mumbai and Bollywood on the map.
That said, most Indians have not seen the film, because it will not open there until next week, a delay that has raised an eyebrow or two: did Mumbai not deserve to see Slumdog first? Instead, pirated copies are doing the rounds while America watches a film that Hollywood refused to fund, because “who wants to see misery and street kids?”.
Boyle describes the film as “very subversive”. He has forestalled potential criticism about plundering another country's horror as entertainment by employing many Indian actors, including Bollywood stars and an Indian composer. Much of the dialogue is in Hindi.
And it may be that the brilliance of the film rescues Boyle from criticism: he is a film-maker, not a social commentator, and nobody doubts its cinematic brilliance. As The New York Times put it: “It's hard to hold on to any reservations in the face of Mr Boyle's resolutely upbeat pitch and seductive visual style.”
That very seductiveness is the problem. But if Boyle may be absolved from criticism, I am not sure the same can be said of the audience. “Slumderful!” declared the New York Post. When we are suckered into enjoying scenes of absolute horror among children in slums on the other side of the world, even dubbing them comedy, we ought to question where our moral compass is pointing. Boyle's most subversive achievement may lie not in revealing the dark underbelly of India - but in revealing ours.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Slumdog - British dirty tricks?
Is Slumdog Millionaire another dirty trick by the British?
If you know a bit about the history of India, you will know the British instigated hostilities between Hindus and Muslims as a way to break up the independence movement using their time tested divide and rule strategy. This cynical ploy later led to the deaths of about 1.5 million people and the forced migration of about 20 million.
This movie was made by an Englishman who twisted the characters from original book to make the secular hero a Muslim and added in a large dose of persecution at the hands of Hindus.
Understandably the western audience is largely unaware of the realities of religious identity and secularism in India and will take this at face value. But reading the comments at various blogs and news sites you can see a clear polarization of opinions on this movie based on religion.
For example:
Here is an comment to an uninformed article by Barbara Crossette:
If you know a bit about the history of India, you will know the British instigated hostilities between Hindus and Muslims as a way to break up the independence movement using their time tested divide and rule strategy. This cynical ploy later led to the deaths of about 1.5 million people and the forced migration of about 20 million.
This movie was made by an Englishman who twisted the characters from original book to make the secular hero a Muslim and added in a large dose of persecution at the hands of Hindus.
Understandably the western audience is largely unaware of the realities of religious identity and secularism in India and will take this at face value. But reading the comments at various blogs and news sites you can see a clear polarization of opinions on this movie based on religion.
For example:
Here is an comment to an uninformed article by Barbara Crossette:
I am a 67-year-old ex-Indian. In 1946, when I was 4 years old, my paternal uncles, aunts and their families were massacred in cold blood, forty-eight in number in three small towns in Bihar: Telhara, Karai Perserai and Salarpur! The total death toll ran into thousands. In 1964 I personally escaped being thrown alive into an industrial furnace in the industrial city of Jamshedpur, the HQ of Tata Steel and other other heavy industries. On the same day the massacres started, similar massacres were conducted by Hindu "terrorists" in two other major industrial cities; Rourkela and Bhilai both in North East India like Jamshedpur! In 1964 the Kashmir "intifada" was two decades ahead. Osama bin Laden was in a primary school. It was 1965 when India "invaded" West Pakistan (now the only Pakistan remaining after India helped East Pakistan secede after another invasion by India). In 1964 the Kashmir cease-fire line was "quiet" in every sense of the word. Why then forced boiler crematoriums for the living? Because it was only in industrial cities like Jamshedpur an educated Indian Muslim like me could land a job on merit, like I had done.
In 1964, right after being saved by a Sikh colleague, I crossed the border into East Pakistan where I was welcomed as an unwanted refugee, but that's another story.
In 1965 I flew to Saudi Arabia after accepting the first overseas job I could land, and it here that I have lived, worked, married locally and raised kids who are now lecturers in Jeddah University.
Had the Hindu "terrorists" who are now being courted by the US allowed me to continue living and enjoying my "human, civil and citizen rights" in India, I wouldn't be sharing any "past hell" with you all!
Hindu "terrorism" is very much alive and getting healthier and stronger with every passing day.
syed salamah ali mahdi
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
#
Is Ms. Crossette aware that the central character in the novel Q and A (on which Slumdog is based) is named Raj Mohammed Thomas? Despite the West's obsession with identity politics and revulsion at the caste system, religion/caste and identity have had a fluid nature in India--a point Vikas Kashyap, the author of Q and A, emphasized in naming the protagonist.
The primary reason for the backwardness of Muslims in India and indeed the world is their desire to shield and protect their women, thereby depriving them of opportunity. To read absurd subtexts can only be accomplished by an elite journalist who during her tenure in India predicted the coming disintegration of India with a confidence matched only by her colleague Judith Miller's on the presence of WMDs in Iraq.
Sumant Rawat
Pueblo , CO
02/24/2009 @ 7:18pm
----
Finally someone has notice and written about the pro-Muslim subtext of the film! The subtext is that Muslims in India are the victims of Hindus. This fits very well into the standard pro-Muslim line that Muslims are always victims--of Hindus, of Christians, of "colonialists," of Jews, you name it. Muslims are always victims.
Unfortunately, neither the author, Barbara Crosette, nor anyone else will tell you that Muslims slaughtered literally millions of Hindus when they invaded and conquered India centuries ago. The Hindus have a lot of pent up grievances against the Muslims in India--which, of course, does not justify the anti-Muslim pogrom portrayed in Slumdog Millionaire.
Abdul Ameer
Chicago, IL
In 1964, right after being saved by a Sikh colleague, I crossed the border into East Pakistan where I was welcomed as an unwanted refugee, but that's another story.
In 1965 I flew to Saudi Arabia after accepting the first overseas job I could land, and it here that I have lived, worked, married locally and raised kids who are now lecturers in Jeddah University.
Had the Hindu "terrorists" who are now being courted by the US allowed me to continue living and enjoying my "human, civil and citizen rights" in India, I wouldn't be sharing any "past hell" with you all!
Hindu "terrorism" is very much alive and getting healthier and stronger with every passing day.
syed salamah ali mahdi
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
#
Is Ms. Crossette aware that the central character in the novel Q and A (on which Slumdog is based) is named Raj Mohammed Thomas? Despite the West's obsession with identity politics and revulsion at the caste system, religion/caste and identity have had a fluid nature in India--a point Vikas Kashyap, the author of Q and A, emphasized in naming the protagonist.
The primary reason for the backwardness of Muslims in India and indeed the world is their desire to shield and protect their women, thereby depriving them of opportunity. To read absurd subtexts can only be accomplished by an elite journalist who during her tenure in India predicted the coming disintegration of India with a confidence matched only by her colleague Judith Miller's on the presence of WMDs in Iraq.
Sumant Rawat
Pueblo , CO
02/24/2009 @ 7:18pm
----
Finally someone has notice and written about the pro-Muslim subtext of the film! The subtext is that Muslims in India are the victims of Hindus. This fits very well into the standard pro-Muslim line that Muslims are always victims--of Hindus, of Christians, of "colonialists," of Jews, you name it. Muslims are always victims.
Unfortunately, neither the author, Barbara Crosette, nor anyone else will tell you that Muslims slaughtered literally millions of Hindus when they invaded and conquered India centuries ago. The Hindus have a lot of pent up grievances against the Muslims in India--which, of course, does not justify the anti-Muslim pogrom portrayed in Slumdog Millionaire.
Abdul Ameer
Chicago, IL
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Slumdog is Oscar winner.
Is the celebration in India justified, is Slumdog really an Indian film? Mutiny puts it well.
But you wouldn't know it from reading the gushing Indian media!
Here is a take from the British media.
And one from Salman Rushdie
Rushdie: 'Slumdog' laden with impossible scenes
February 23, 2009
ATLANTA (AP) — Famed novelist Salman Rushdie apparently wasn't too impressed with the Oscar-winning film "Slumdog Millionaire," telling an Atlanta audience it "piles impossibility on impossibility."
Rushdie, who spent years in hiding after Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for the author's death in 1989, made the remarks Sunday during a speech to more than 1,000 people at Atlanta's Emory University. The author criticized other Oscar winners adapted from books, including "The Reader" and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports the 61-year-old author of "The Satanic Verses" complained about several scenes, including one in which characters wind up at the Taj Mahal — 1,000 miles from the previous scene.
But you wouldn't know it from reading the gushing Indian media!
Here is a take from the British media.
And one from Salman Rushdie
Rushdie: 'Slumdog' laden with impossible scenes
February 23, 2009
ATLANTA (AP) — Famed novelist Salman Rushdie apparently wasn't too impressed with the Oscar-winning film "Slumdog Millionaire," telling an Atlanta audience it "piles impossibility on impossibility."
Rushdie, who spent years in hiding after Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for the author's death in 1989, made the remarks Sunday during a speech to more than 1,000 people at Atlanta's Emory University. The author criticized other Oscar winners adapted from books, including "The Reader" and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports the 61-year-old author of "The Satanic Verses" complained about several scenes, including one in which characters wind up at the Taj Mahal — 1,000 miles from the previous scene.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Slumdog Millionaire just doesn't cut it for me
33 Horrors And A Happy Ending
The episodic construction, the cardboard and one-dimensional characters, the 'garbage tourism' feel, which some have called 'poverty porn' -- it's all just slumbug.
BISHAKHA DATTA
Outlook (India)
I don't have a problem with anyone making a film on India's problems. (Or Mumbai's) . And I couldn't care less who makes a film, writes a book, tells a story, or sings a song about anything or anyone: insider or outsider. Gregory David Roberts or Satyajit Ray. Or which light it shows India in: shining or dim.
I loved Danny Boyle's earlier film Trainspotting. But Slumdog Millionaire just doesn't cut it for me as a film.
What didn't work for me was the treatment; three things in particular.
The episodic construction: 33 horrors and a happy ending (Shit. Acid blindings. Child prostitution. Begging. Rape. And so forth. You get the drift...)
The characters: cardboard and one-dimensional. (I've never seen a film before where every single adult is uniformly nasty, if not downright evil.)
The 'garbage tourism' feel, which some have called 'poverty porn': I have no objections to porn per se - there's good porn and bad porn. It all depends on the perspective. And on the treatment. The reason this has the touristy feel (as opposed to the travel feel, which is about curiosity, exploration and discovery) is because it is so singularly uncurious. If Edmund Hillary famously said he climbed Everest because it was there, this films a garbage can because it is there. But it doesn't do anything interesting with the garbage can. Yes, we all know begging, rape and child prostitution exist, not to mention acid blindings - but surely they need some treatment beyond, "They exist so let's shoot them."
Gregory David Roberts also located his bestselling novel Shantaram in the slums of Mumbai. And I loved it, including its pulp fiction form and feel. The lepers who sell fake medicines, the experience of shitting in the slums, the milieu, the energy, the characters. They were all mad and bad and wild and crazy. They had nuances. He did something with them - he didn't just stand there and say: "Oh my god! A slum! Gawp!"
So did Fernando Meirelles in his recent film Blindness, based on Jose Saramago's novel of the same name. Meirelles earlier made City of God, which is often invoked when Slumdog is discussed. In Blindness, he uses blindness as a central plot element - an entire city turns blind - and as an extreme backdrop to explore the human psyche. Sure, there are those who take advantage of the situation. And there are others who don't. And 'good vs evil' is not the only axis along which the characters are treated in the film. There are strong fictional characters. They have shadings. They have other elements to them.
While some groups have protested Blindness (saying it demeans the blind), that's not what I took away. But while Meirelles does not in any way - explicitly or implicitly - treat blindness as demeaning, Slumdog treats poverty as an outpost of hell, peopled by living monsters. Its treatment seems to imply that poverty creates uni-dimensional monsters, not real, rounded human beings. (It's not the poverty, stupid. It's the treatment.)
Going by the acclaim that Slumdog has gathered, should writers now treat all characters in poor settings as single-sheet cardboard and only those in more affluent settings as rounded flesh and blood? Or should poor 'characters' also get some scriptwriting attention and be constructed in ways that are unique? Can a protagonist be treated as a straight line just because he is poor? Would Ray's Pather Panchali have got such worldwide acclaim if Durga and Apu had been as unipolar as Slumdog's Jamal? And should we, as viewers, lower all our cinematic expectations just because a film is set in a slum?
Perhaps all this would not have mattered if a lesser-known filmmaker had made Slumdog.But when a filmmaker with Boyle's credentials comes into the picture, one does have expectations. And to be fair, some of these are met. The energy, the camerawork, the music - these are all Slumdog's strengths.
But I still don't understand why an ordinary fast-paced film is being treated as a cinematic masterpiece. As Namrata Joshi wrote, "Why is the world reacting as though someone has done something startlingly new to cinema?"
It's a mystery. More so since Boyle seems to have got his cues straight from Bollywood. Like Baz Luhrmann, who at least took the right things from Bollywood. He took the trappings: the glitz colour music dance spectacle. ("Spectacular! Spectacular" as one of the characters from Moulin Rouge says flamboyantly in a song whose lyrics include: "Elephants! Bohemians! Indians! and courtesans! Acrobats! and juggling bears! exotic girls! fire eaters! Muscle men, contortionists!")
That's Bollywood. The plot is irrelevant, the song sequences dazzling. Why think when you can see? Why meditate when you can levitate?
But who lifts plot elements from Bollywood? Or its characters and clich�s? (There is no doubt Bolly scripts and treatment are both improving with a new generation of directors and writers entering the fray - see Om Shanti Om, Johny Gaddar, Life in A Metro etc. But these are still exceptions, not the rule. And it is of course a supreme irony that while Bollywood has been struggling to get a foothold in the Oscar best foreign film category, a Bollywood wannabe may walk away with the top honours: Best Film in the English Language.
At the end of the day, this is nothing but a boy-meets-girl Bollywood pastiche shot in exotic slum locales. But on top of everything else, what Slumdog lacks is Bollywood's trademark strengths: The oomph. The sizzle. The razzmatazz. And the masala. Where's the masala?
In its place is a gaping void. So how many horrors does a film need to fill a black hole? 33 and a happy ending? Who knows? Who cares?
Anyway, in the end, boy gets rich, boy gets girl, everyone's happy -- and it's all just slumbug.
Bishakha Datta, a writer and filmmaker with extensive media experience, is the programme director of Point of View
_____________________
'Why Slumdog fails to move me'
BBC online
Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle's new film based on a rags-to-riches tale of an Indian slum boy, has already become one of the hits of the year. The BBC's Soutik Biswas wonders whether it is really the "masterpiece" it is made out to be.
Slumdog Millionaire poster
The film has been called a Dickensian take on the city of Mumbai
Like his protagonist, a gutsy 18-year-old slum boy who is on the verge of winning 20 million rupees (about $400,000) in a popular TV quiz show, Danny Boyle has hit an unlikely jackpot with Slumdog Millionaire.
And much like Jamal, a child who nobody believes could get this far on the TV show without cheating, Boyle is being roasted by some critics for taking an easy shortcut and "using" poverty to serve up a we-are-poor-but-we-are-happy story.
After picking up four US Golden Globe awards and raking in nearly $50m at the box office in the US and Britain already, Slumdog, unquestionably, is the flavour of the season.
With its mixed cast, the much-feted and hyped film is also Boyle's paean to Mumbai (Bombay), India's edgy metropolis of extremes, and Bollywood, the world's most prolific film industry.
Everybody loves a good underdog. That is why Slumdog touches a chord
Your comments on this review
Some have called it a moving Dickensian take on Mumbai thanks to its portrayal of the city's stifling and colourful squalor and the people who live in it. Others have derisively called it poverty porn. One critic called Boyle's work "slum chic".
Well, yes, in the shadow of rubbish mountains, mothers get hacked to death in front of their children in religious rioting and a movie star-struck slum boy defecating under the open sky falls into a slush of excreta. Children get their eyes burnt with acid, and girls are forced into brothels by rakish young men.
Dharavi slum in Mumbai
Slumdog is based in Mumbai's teeming slums
On the eve of the film's release in India, NGOs invite reporters to meet the "real slumdogs". "Off the back of Slumdog Millionaire," says one invitation in my inbox, "we can offer access to the slums of Delhi and interview opportunities with the real 'slumdogs' - children who live in absolute poverty every day."
Poverty, like a lot of things, is good business in a free market. But India is also exceedingly cruel to its poor and callous towards its children, and is one of the most unequal societies in the world.
I have no issues with Boyle's cheery depiction of the resilience of slum children and the sunny side of slum life: it is part of the unchanging popular oriental stereotype of poverty equals slums equals dirty, smiling children. Been there, seen that.
In fact, Indians appear to have come to terms with Western filmmakers' depiction of the country's crushing poverty.
I remember the sets - a vast slum, what else? - of Roland Joffe's multi-million dollar City of Joy, starring Patrick Swayze, being firebombed by arsonists in the city of Calcutta in the early 1990s. They charged him with selling poverty. Joffe had to pack up his bags, leave the city and finish the film at London's Pinewood studios.
My quibble with Slumdog Millionaire lies elsewhere. The film doesn't move me.
I suspect what Boyle tries to do is a Bollywood film - the dirt-poor lost brothers, unrequited love - with dollops of gritty realism. But at the end of it all, it is a pretty callow copy of a genre which only the Indians can make with the élan it deserves.
The realism skims the surface, and in spite of some decent performances, style dominates over substance. And the film does not grip me in the way, say, the story of the life in Rio de Janeiro's favelas in the 2002 Brazilian crime drama City of God did.
__________________
See also:
A dangerous fairy tale
The episodic construction, the cardboard and one-dimensional characters, the 'garbage tourism' feel, which some have called 'poverty porn' -- it's all just slumbug.
BISHAKHA DATTA
Outlook (India)
I don't have a problem with anyone making a film on India's problems. (Or Mumbai's) . And I couldn't care less who makes a film, writes a book, tells a story, or sings a song about anything or anyone: insider or outsider. Gregory David Roberts or Satyajit Ray. Or which light it shows India in: shining or dim.
I loved Danny Boyle's earlier film Trainspotting. But Slumdog Millionaire just doesn't cut it for me as a film.
What didn't work for me was the treatment; three things in particular.
The episodic construction: 33 horrors and a happy ending (Shit. Acid blindings. Child prostitution. Begging. Rape. And so forth. You get the drift...)
The characters: cardboard and one-dimensional. (I've never seen a film before where every single adult is uniformly nasty, if not downright evil.)
The 'garbage tourism' feel, which some have called 'poverty porn': I have no objections to porn per se - there's good porn and bad porn. It all depends on the perspective. And on the treatment. The reason this has the touristy feel (as opposed to the travel feel, which is about curiosity, exploration and discovery) is because it is so singularly uncurious. If Edmund Hillary famously said he climbed Everest because it was there, this films a garbage can because it is there. But it doesn't do anything interesting with the garbage can. Yes, we all know begging, rape and child prostitution exist, not to mention acid blindings - but surely they need some treatment beyond, "They exist so let's shoot them."
Gregory David Roberts also located his bestselling novel Shantaram in the slums of Mumbai. And I loved it, including its pulp fiction form and feel. The lepers who sell fake medicines, the experience of shitting in the slums, the milieu, the energy, the characters. They were all mad and bad and wild and crazy. They had nuances. He did something with them - he didn't just stand there and say: "Oh my god! A slum! Gawp!"
So did Fernando Meirelles in his recent film Blindness, based on Jose Saramago's novel of the same name. Meirelles earlier made City of God, which is often invoked when Slumdog is discussed. In Blindness, he uses blindness as a central plot element - an entire city turns blind - and as an extreme backdrop to explore the human psyche. Sure, there are those who take advantage of the situation. And there are others who don't. And 'good vs evil' is not the only axis along which the characters are treated in the film. There are strong fictional characters. They have shadings. They have other elements to them.
While some groups have protested Blindness (saying it demeans the blind), that's not what I took away. But while Meirelles does not in any way - explicitly or implicitly - treat blindness as demeaning, Slumdog treats poverty as an outpost of hell, peopled by living monsters. Its treatment seems to imply that poverty creates uni-dimensional monsters, not real, rounded human beings. (It's not the poverty, stupid. It's the treatment.)
Going by the acclaim that Slumdog has gathered, should writers now treat all characters in poor settings as single-sheet cardboard and only those in more affluent settings as rounded flesh and blood? Or should poor 'characters' also get some scriptwriting attention and be constructed in ways that are unique? Can a protagonist be treated as a straight line just because he is poor? Would Ray's Pather Panchali have got such worldwide acclaim if Durga and Apu had been as unipolar as Slumdog's Jamal? And should we, as viewers, lower all our cinematic expectations just because a film is set in a slum?
Perhaps all this would not have mattered if a lesser-known filmmaker had made Slumdog.But when a filmmaker with Boyle's credentials comes into the picture, one does have expectations. And to be fair, some of these are met. The energy, the camerawork, the music - these are all Slumdog's strengths.
But I still don't understand why an ordinary fast-paced film is being treated as a cinematic masterpiece. As Namrata Joshi wrote, "Why is the world reacting as though someone has done something startlingly new to cinema?"
It's a mystery. More so since Boyle seems to have got his cues straight from Bollywood. Like Baz Luhrmann, who at least took the right things from Bollywood. He took the trappings: the glitz colour music dance spectacle. ("Spectacular! Spectacular" as one of the characters from Moulin Rouge says flamboyantly in a song whose lyrics include: "Elephants! Bohemians! Indians! and courtesans! Acrobats! and juggling bears! exotic girls! fire eaters! Muscle men, contortionists!")
That's Bollywood. The plot is irrelevant, the song sequences dazzling. Why think when you can see? Why meditate when you can levitate?
But who lifts plot elements from Bollywood? Or its characters and clich�s? (There is no doubt Bolly scripts and treatment are both improving with a new generation of directors and writers entering the fray - see Om Shanti Om, Johny Gaddar, Life in A Metro etc. But these are still exceptions, not the rule. And it is of course a supreme irony that while Bollywood has been struggling to get a foothold in the Oscar best foreign film category, a Bollywood wannabe may walk away with the top honours: Best Film in the English Language.
At the end of the day, this is nothing but a boy-meets-girl Bollywood pastiche shot in exotic slum locales. But on top of everything else, what Slumdog lacks is Bollywood's trademark strengths: The oomph. The sizzle. The razzmatazz. And the masala. Where's the masala?
In its place is a gaping void. So how many horrors does a film need to fill a black hole? 33 and a happy ending? Who knows? Who cares?
Anyway, in the end, boy gets rich, boy gets girl, everyone's happy -- and it's all just slumbug.
Bishakha Datta, a writer and filmmaker with extensive media experience, is the programme director of Point of View
_____________________
'Why Slumdog fails to move me'
BBC online
Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle's new film based on a rags-to-riches tale of an Indian slum boy, has already become one of the hits of the year. The BBC's Soutik Biswas wonders whether it is really the "masterpiece" it is made out to be.
Slumdog Millionaire poster
The film has been called a Dickensian take on the city of Mumbai
Like his protagonist, a gutsy 18-year-old slum boy who is on the verge of winning 20 million rupees (about $400,000) in a popular TV quiz show, Danny Boyle has hit an unlikely jackpot with Slumdog Millionaire.
And much like Jamal, a child who nobody believes could get this far on the TV show without cheating, Boyle is being roasted by some critics for taking an easy shortcut and "using" poverty to serve up a we-are-poor-but-we-are-happy story.
After picking up four US Golden Globe awards and raking in nearly $50m at the box office in the US and Britain already, Slumdog, unquestionably, is the flavour of the season.
With its mixed cast, the much-feted and hyped film is also Boyle's paean to Mumbai (Bombay), India's edgy metropolis of extremes, and Bollywood, the world's most prolific film industry.
Everybody loves a good underdog. That is why Slumdog touches a chord
Your comments on this review
Some have called it a moving Dickensian take on Mumbai thanks to its portrayal of the city's stifling and colourful squalor and the people who live in it. Others have derisively called it poverty porn. One critic called Boyle's work "slum chic".
Well, yes, in the shadow of rubbish mountains, mothers get hacked to death in front of their children in religious rioting and a movie star-struck slum boy defecating under the open sky falls into a slush of excreta. Children get their eyes burnt with acid, and girls are forced into brothels by rakish young men.
Dharavi slum in Mumbai
Slumdog is based in Mumbai's teeming slums
On the eve of the film's release in India, NGOs invite reporters to meet the "real slumdogs". "Off the back of Slumdog Millionaire," says one invitation in my inbox, "we can offer access to the slums of Delhi and interview opportunities with the real 'slumdogs' - children who live in absolute poverty every day."
Poverty, like a lot of things, is good business in a free market. But India is also exceedingly cruel to its poor and callous towards its children, and is one of the most unequal societies in the world.
I have no issues with Boyle's cheery depiction of the resilience of slum children and the sunny side of slum life: it is part of the unchanging popular oriental stereotype of poverty equals slums equals dirty, smiling children. Been there, seen that.
In fact, Indians appear to have come to terms with Western filmmakers' depiction of the country's crushing poverty.
I remember the sets - a vast slum, what else? - of Roland Joffe's multi-million dollar City of Joy, starring Patrick Swayze, being firebombed by arsonists in the city of Calcutta in the early 1990s. They charged him with selling poverty. Joffe had to pack up his bags, leave the city and finish the film at London's Pinewood studios.
My quibble with Slumdog Millionaire lies elsewhere. The film doesn't move me.
I suspect what Boyle tries to do is a Bollywood film - the dirt-poor lost brothers, unrequited love - with dollops of gritty realism. But at the end of it all, it is a pretty callow copy of a genre which only the Indians can make with the élan it deserves.
The realism skims the surface, and in spite of some decent performances, style dominates over substance. And the film does not grip me in the way, say, the story of the life in Rio de Janeiro's favelas in the 2002 Brazilian crime drama City of God did.
__________________
See also:
A dangerous fairy tale
Monday, January 26, 2009
Shocked by Slumdog's poverty porn
Danny Boyle's film is sweeping up awards, but it's wrong to revel in the misery of India's children
The Times (UK)
Alice Miles
January 14, 2009
There are many reasons why you might want to see Slumdog Millionaire - it is directed by the brilliant Danny Boyle, it is set in the sensual feast that is Mumbai and it has won awards for music, directing and acting. And then there is the fact that critics and its own publicity have branded it a feel-good movie. Call me shallow, but that ultimately swung it for me.
A few hours later I was wincing in my seat. The film opens with a scene of horrible violence: a man hanging from the ceiling of a police station, being tortured to unconsciousness, a trickle of blood running from his mouth. It moves swiftly into scenes of utter misery and depravity, in which small starving children are beaten, mutilated and perverted.
Mothers die horribly in front of their sons, small girls are turned into prostitutes, small boys into beggars. I hope it won't spoil the feel-good surprise if I tell you that one particularly sadistic scene shows a young boy having his eyes burnt out with acid to maximise the profits of street begging. Charities working with street children in India seem unaware of any instances of this, although Save the Children emphasises that similar violence against children by beggar mafia is well documented.
The film is brilliant, horrifying, compelling and awful, the relentless violence leavened only by an occasional clip of someone working his way through the questions on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?. You might want to look away, but you can't and, despite the banal storyline, I can see why it is pulling in the awards.
Yet the film is vile. Unlike other Boyle films such as Trainspotting or Shallow Grave, which also revel in a fantastical comic violence, Slumdog Millionaire is about children. And it is set not in the West but in the slums of the Third World. As the film revels in the violence, degradation and horror, it invites you, the Westerner, to enjoy it, too. Will they find it such fun in Mumbai?
Like the bestselling novel by the Americanised Afghan Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Slumdog Millionaire is not a million miles away from a form of pornographic voyeurism. A Thousand Splendid Suns is obsessed with rape and violence against women, the reader asked to pore over every last horrible detail. Slumdog Millionaire is poverty porn.
Here is the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) summary of the film. It judged it suitable for viewers aged 15 or over (I would add another ten to that): “Strong violence is seen in a scene where a group of Muslims are attacked and killed in the street - together with general chaos and beatings, there are some stronger and more explicit moments, such as the deliberate setting of a man on fire... We also later see strong violence that includes a knife held to a woman's throat as she's forcibly snatched off the street, an impressionistic blinding of a young beggar boy, and torture by electricity in a police station. The BBFC has placed this work in the COMEDY genre.”
Comedy? So maybe that's it: I just didn't get the joke.
I wonder if India will, or whether, as with Aravind Adiga's Man Booker prize-winning novel, The White Tiger, people will feel more ambivalent than in the West. An editorial in dnaindia.com, a Mumbai-based online newspaper, read: “The miserable existence of the average slum dweller, which we in India know so well, is novel to the Western viewer... The awarding of the Booker Prize to The White Tiger shows that the seamier side of the Indian dream continues to have a resonance in Western sensibilities. The White Tiger's victory left many Indians underwhelmed; who is to say that when Indian audiences finally see Slumdog they will not be equally put off?”
As a review on the same website by Vrinda Nabar, an Indian professor at a US university, put it: “Slumdog's eventual victory comes at a price. When the selective manipulation of Third World squalor can make for a feel-good movie in a dismal year, the global village has a long way to go.”
Quite. The Mumbai Mirror dubbed it “Slum Chic”, and notes that the term “slumdog” is not widely recognised in India: “It appears to be a British invention to describe a poor Dharavi kid in a derogatory way.”
I am being highly selective: mostly, India seems in thrall to the brilliance of Slumdog and how it has put Mumbai and Bollywood on the map.
That said, most Indians have not seen the film, because it will not open there until next week, a delay that has raised an eyebrow or two: did Mumbai not deserve to see Slumdog first? Instead, pirated copies are doing the rounds while America watches a film that Hollywood refused to fund, because “who wants to see misery and street kids?”.
Boyle describes the film as “very subversive”. He has forestalled potential criticism about plundering another country's horror as entertainment by employing many Indian actors, including Bollywood stars and an Indian composer. Much of the dialogue is in Hindi.
And it may be that the brilliance of the film rescues Boyle from criticism: he is a film-maker, not a social commentator, and nobody doubts its cinematic brilliance. As The New York Times put it: “It's hard to hold on to any reservations in the face of Mr Boyle's resolutely upbeat pitch and seductive visual style.”
That very seductiveness is the problem. But if Boyle may be absolved from criticism, I am not sure the same can be said of the audience. “Slumderful!” declared the New York Post. When we are suckered into enjoying scenes of absolute horror among children in slums on the other side of the world, even dubbing them comedy, we ought to question where our moral compass is pointing. Boyle's most subversive achievement may lie not in revealing the dark underbelly of India - but in revealing ours.
______________
See also:
Another Husain
The Times (UK)
Alice Miles
January 14, 2009
There are many reasons why you might want to see Slumdog Millionaire - it is directed by the brilliant Danny Boyle, it is set in the sensual feast that is Mumbai and it has won awards for music, directing and acting. And then there is the fact that critics and its own publicity have branded it a feel-good movie. Call me shallow, but that ultimately swung it for me.
A few hours later I was wincing in my seat. The film opens with a scene of horrible violence: a man hanging from the ceiling of a police station, being tortured to unconsciousness, a trickle of blood running from his mouth. It moves swiftly into scenes of utter misery and depravity, in which small starving children are beaten, mutilated and perverted.
Mothers die horribly in front of their sons, small girls are turned into prostitutes, small boys into beggars. I hope it won't spoil the feel-good surprise if I tell you that one particularly sadistic scene shows a young boy having his eyes burnt out with acid to maximise the profits of street begging. Charities working with street children in India seem unaware of any instances of this, although Save the Children emphasises that similar violence against children by beggar mafia is well documented.
The film is brilliant, horrifying, compelling and awful, the relentless violence leavened only by an occasional clip of someone working his way through the questions on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?. You might want to look away, but you can't and, despite the banal storyline, I can see why it is pulling in the awards.
Yet the film is vile. Unlike other Boyle films such as Trainspotting or Shallow Grave, which also revel in a fantastical comic violence, Slumdog Millionaire is about children. And it is set not in the West but in the slums of the Third World. As the film revels in the violence, degradation and horror, it invites you, the Westerner, to enjoy it, too. Will they find it such fun in Mumbai?
Like the bestselling novel by the Americanised Afghan Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Slumdog Millionaire is not a million miles away from a form of pornographic voyeurism. A Thousand Splendid Suns is obsessed with rape and violence against women, the reader asked to pore over every last horrible detail. Slumdog Millionaire is poverty porn.
Here is the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) summary of the film. It judged it suitable for viewers aged 15 or over (I would add another ten to that): “Strong violence is seen in a scene where a group of Muslims are attacked and killed in the street - together with general chaos and beatings, there are some stronger and more explicit moments, such as the deliberate setting of a man on fire... We also later see strong violence that includes a knife held to a woman's throat as she's forcibly snatched off the street, an impressionistic blinding of a young beggar boy, and torture by electricity in a police station. The BBFC has placed this work in the COMEDY genre.”
Comedy? So maybe that's it: I just didn't get the joke.
I wonder if India will, or whether, as with Aravind Adiga's Man Booker prize-winning novel, The White Tiger, people will feel more ambivalent than in the West. An editorial in dnaindia.com, a Mumbai-based online newspaper, read: “The miserable existence of the average slum dweller, which we in India know so well, is novel to the Western viewer... The awarding of the Booker Prize to The White Tiger shows that the seamier side of the Indian dream continues to have a resonance in Western sensibilities. The White Tiger's victory left many Indians underwhelmed; who is to say that when Indian audiences finally see Slumdog they will not be equally put off?”
As a review on the same website by Vrinda Nabar, an Indian professor at a US university, put it: “Slumdog's eventual victory comes at a price. When the selective manipulation of Third World squalor can make for a feel-good movie in a dismal year, the global village has a long way to go.”
Quite. The Mumbai Mirror dubbed it “Slum Chic”, and notes that the term “slumdog” is not widely recognised in India: “It appears to be a British invention to describe a poor Dharavi kid in a derogatory way.”
I am being highly selective: mostly, India seems in thrall to the brilliance of Slumdog and how it has put Mumbai and Bollywood on the map.
That said, most Indians have not seen the film, because it will not open there until next week, a delay that has raised an eyebrow or two: did Mumbai not deserve to see Slumdog first? Instead, pirated copies are doing the rounds while America watches a film that Hollywood refused to fund, because “who wants to see misery and street kids?”.
Boyle describes the film as “very subversive”. He has forestalled potential criticism about plundering another country's horror as entertainment by employing many Indian actors, including Bollywood stars and an Indian composer. Much of the dialogue is in Hindi.
And it may be that the brilliance of the film rescues Boyle from criticism: he is a film-maker, not a social commentator, and nobody doubts its cinematic brilliance. As The New York Times put it: “It's hard to hold on to any reservations in the face of Mr Boyle's resolutely upbeat pitch and seductive visual style.”
That very seductiveness is the problem. But if Boyle may be absolved from criticism, I am not sure the same can be said of the audience. “Slumderful!” declared the New York Post. When we are suckered into enjoying scenes of absolute horror among children in slums on the other side of the world, even dubbing them comedy, we ought to question where our moral compass is pointing. Boyle's most subversive achievement may lie not in revealing the dark underbelly of India - but in revealing ours.
______________
See also:
Another Husain
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