As much I have a penchant for good writing and admiration for those who write
well, this review clearly is circuitously ambiguous with a heavy slant against
Boyle.
Nevertheless, quite an interesting read for its very different perspective.
Ganpy.
--- In arrahmanfans@yahoogroups.com, Vithur <vith...@...> wrote:
>
> Slumdog Millionaire
> April 01, 2009
>
> By Koehler, Robert
>
> Slumdog Millionaire Produced by Christian Colson; directed by Danny Boyle;
> co-directed (India) by Loveleen Tandan; screenplay by Simon Beaufoy, based
> on the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup; cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle;
> production design by Mark Digby; costumes by Suttirat Anne Larlarb; edited
> by Chris Dickens; music by A.R. Rahman; starring Dev Patel, Frieda Pinto,
> Madhur Mittal, Anil Kapoor, Irrfan Khan CQ, Tanay Hemant Chheda CQ, Tanvi
> Ganesh Lonkar, Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala. 116 mins. A Fox Searchlight release.
>
> Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire is the film of the moment for the "new
> middlebrow"- that audience able to perceive momentous changes in the world
> and culture when they're reported in, say, The New York Times, but one, at
> the same time, that wouldn't have the slightest clue that the most thrilling
> new rushes of creative filmmaking since the nouvelle vague originate in the
> apartments and editing rooms of Manila, Kuala Lumpur, Barcelona, and Buenos
> Aires. This new middlebrow has a fresh object of adoration in Boyle's
> entertainment, since it quite conveniently summarizes and expresses so many
> wishes, hopes, and romantic yearnings of the West toward what is perceived
> as the troubled East- with today's West resembling nothing so much as the
> West of the Sixties and its taste for turning Indian style into various
> forms of Hippie Chic. (Slumdog is paisley cinema, pure and simple.) Boyle's
> feverish, woozy, drunken, and thoroughly contrived picaresque also
> conveniently packages misperceptions about India (and the East) that
> continue to support the dominant Western view of the Subcontinent, making
> the film a potent object to examine not only what is cockeyed about an
> outsider's view (particularly, an Englishman's view) of India, but even
> more, what is misperceived by a middlebrow critical establishment and
> audience about what comprises world cinema.
>
> Suitably then, the creative godfather of Slumdog, more than Bollywood
> musical fantasies, is Charles Dickens. Certain Bollywood tropes are
> obediently followed, such as the innocent hero rising above terrible
> circumstances, the determined pursuit of a love against all odds and that
> stock Bollywood type, the snarling (often mustachioed) nemesis. But,
> including the much discussed group-dance finale, these are tropes included
> almost by necessity and play onscreen in a notably rote fashion. They are
> alien to Boyle, which is why the Dickens model is more culturally and even
> cinematically germane when addressing the issues inside Slumdog. Dickens's
> picaresque novels about young underdog heroes struggling and managing to
> eventually thrive in social settings weighed heavily against them were grist
> for, first, Vikas Swarup's novel, Q & A, and then, Simon Beaufoy's loosely
> adapted screenplay, which greatly compresses the novel's episodes and
> sections, renames characters and- for as outlandish as the final film is-
> actually tones down the adventure's more incredible events and coincidences.
>
>
> If Dickens's milieu was the early years of the Industrial Revolution, the
> film's setting is the new era of globalism, in which India is undergoing its
> own revolution. Jamal (Dev Patel) is Pip, Nicholas Nickleby, and Oliver
> Twist rolled into one, a lad who by sheer gumption has managed to land a
> spot as a contestant on the hugely popular Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
> even though he's a humble (but oh so smart) chai wallah (or tea servant) at
> a cell- phone sales center. When he's first seen on screen, though, Jamal is
> in trouble: A fat cop is abusing him in a police station, though that's
> nothing next to the electrocution he receives from the chief inspector
> (veteran Indian actor Irrfan Khan), who's convinced that Jamal has cheated
> on the show. How, his caste- based logic goes, could a "slumdog" like Jamal
> have won ten million rupees (and only one question away from winning 100
> million) without cheating? Even the most scurrilous and bigoted of Mumbai
> cops likely wouldn't go all Abu Ghraib on a poor teen boy for cheating on
> TV, and it's just the start of the film's endless supply of stunning
> exaggeration-for- effect gambits that are more like a two-by-four upside the
> head than anything that might be termed in polite company as "dramatic
> touches." Boyle appears to have absorbed this exaggeration into his
> directorial bloodstream, since, in at least the film's first half and
> lingering long into the second, he indulges in a rush of shots filmed with
> an obsessively canted camera, the technique lovingly nurtured by Orson
> Welles to convey states of eruption and dislocation, but grievously abused
> by Boyle through repetitive excess until it reeks of desperation.
>
> So, we get it: Jamal has everything stacked against him as he must convince
> these thugs with badges how he knew the questions thrown to him by the
> show's supercilious and remarkably condescending host, Prem (Anil Kapoor),
> and that he will-it is written-prevail. From here, the rest of the movie
> comprises Jamal's case, which begins with the wildly implausible notion that
> Jamal remembers more or less everything in his life inside the framework of
> a Dickens novel, and ends with his endless and, um, dogged pursuit of his
> only true love, the beautiful (can she be anything else?) Latika (Frieda
> Pinto). Of course, wild implausibility has been Boyle's general
> stock-in-trade for some time, beginning with his Clockwork Orange pastiche,
> Trainspotting (which followed his Hammer pastiche, Shallow Grave, and
> preceded his Roland Emmerich pastiche, The Beach, a film so awful that it
> would have killed many lesser mortals' directing careers on the spot, and
> nearly killed Boyle's). 28 Days Later was intrinsically implausible-about
> zombies apparently ready to race Usain Bolt in the Olympics-but so burly,
> aggressive, and spectacularly rude that it didn't allow a moment's pause for
> reflection. Is Boyle's last movie, Sunshine, about a space crew on a mission
> straight for the sun, any more ridiculous than Slumdog Millionaire, which
> suggests that a little Muslim boy raised in Mumbai's worst hellholes can
> become rich and famous? (Well, maybe a little more.)
>
> Because Slumdog isn't conceived as a genre piece with its own built-in
> conventions (horror, sci-fi) but is rather a self- consciously contrived
> picaresque situated in the real world of Indian class structure, Muslim/
> Hindu religious conflicts, underworld crime rings, and pop media, the sheer
> impulse to push the story into a frothy romance functions as a betrayal of
> its fundamental material. In the end, when Jamal has won (because, as the
> viewer is reminded more times than is worth counting, his victory is
> destined to happen), he becomes India's new superstar, its latest populist
> hero, a seeming sensation, a bolt out of the blue. So where is he? Squatting
> ever so quietly, alone, unmolested, unnoticed by anyone in Mumbai's central
> train station, where he spots Latika, also alone, and where they then run to
> each other and break into a Bollywoodstyle number. The effect of this scene
> turned the first audience at Telluride, based on eyewitness accounts, all
> goofy in the head. ("I wanted to run outside and scream and holler at the
> mountains," one starry-eyed survivor told me.)
>
> It's hard to argue against such sentiment or reaction; for sure, early
> viewers of Julie Andrews running down that Austrian meadow in The Sound of
> Music were similarly nutty. Some are just mad for Slumdog Millionaire-
> including far, far too many critics- and they won't hear a discouraging
> word. As the cultlike object of many in the new middlebrow, no argument is
> heard, and some express outright shock when their beloved new movie is
> broken apart, knocked, or outright dismissed as what it is-a really, really
> minor movie, with really, really big problems. Just as the score by composer
> A.R. Rahman, a crafty and fairly cynical Bollywood hand, is bogus "Indian"
> music from top to bottom, with an excess of quasi-hiphop stylings,
> electronic beat patterns and vocalese gumming up the works and sounding like
> the kind of backgrounds one might hear in a TV travel advert, so the closing
> number is bogus Bollywood following on the heels of bogus social drama.
>
> The problem, for the fresh-scrubbed middlebrow and for the rest of us, is
> that if the real thing isn't known-that is, genuinely Indian cinema-how to
> judge the Fox Searchlight facsimile?
>
> Really, though, Slumdog is fun, so let your quibbles just drift away, sit
> back, relax and let it spill all over you like a nice mango lassi. That's
> certainly the refrain of too many of the post- Telluride reviews, which
> recognized Boyle's brazen manipulations and absurd storytelling jumps of
> even marginal logic for what they were but still joined in the cheering (a
> word that I counted in at least ten reviews). And they're right; it is
> fun-fun as a cultural fabrication to question. Consider this overlooked yet
> central aspect of the film's many conceits: Slumdog uses TV as a national
> arena, and precisely as the medium wherein Jamal not only escapes his class,
> but (when the show is reviewed on tape during the police station
> interrogation) uses it as a tool to justify his existence. The film at once
> reinforces the myths of reality game show TV as actual rather than
> manufactured suspense and as a machine for getting rich quick, while-in
> total contradiction- suggests that TV can also be a partner with the police
> in torture. As at so many other points, Boyle and Beaufoy try to have it
> both ways: Jamal proves his mettle by deploying his life experiences in
> order to be the ideal game show star, while the show itself (via Prem, who
> says that he "owns" the show and reveals that he's also from the slums)
> collaborates with police to persecute and torture Jamal, even though Prem
> also knows-an important point-that Jamal isn't cheating. The basis for
> arranging for Jamal's arrest is a collapsing house of cards on close
> inspection, since the arrest is not only a surprise to the show's producer,
> but couldn't have possibly been managed by Prem, who has after all been on
> the show during airtime. Perhaps Prem is jealous of his fellow slumdog? An
> interesting, even profound, character point-one that's right there, hanging
> like ripe narrative fruit, and which would have been even more interesting
> had Beaufoy and Boyle bothered to pluck it. The Dickensian sensibility, with
> its ironies and coincidences, is imposed here but never truly developed and
> only selectively applied-Dickens's picaresque tales, laden with social
> criticism and narrative athleticism, never fail to point a harsh finger at
> unjust authority (something Boyle is clearly uncomfortable doing) through a
> romance of the hero's ultimately improbable triumph over odds (something
> Boyle bases his whole movie on, culminating with the ersatz Bollywood
> finale). As a result, the exchanges of colonialism in Slumdog Millionaire
> are too delicious not to notice. In a single film, we have: the celebration
> of the export of a British gameshow to the Indian viewing public; a
> narrative structured on the show itself and the (British) Dickens
> picaresque; a disastrously tone-deaf and colorblind depiction of the world
> experienced by Muslim lower classes as decorated in gloriously erotic and
> lush colors as perhaps only a European-based director (Boyle) and
> cinematographer (the usually brilliant and ingenious Anthony Dod Mantle)
> could manage; a British-themed call center as the opening of opportunity and
> upward mobility for Jamal.
>
> In its expressly liberal intentions to depict an India in which a single
> Muslim boy can win a nation's heart, Slumdog Millionaire massages the
> Western viewer's gaze on a country and culture they barely know, save for a
> vague sense of cultural exports like the occasional Bollywood movie or song.
> Perhaps especially now, after the fearsome attacks by Islamist extremists on
> Mumbai's most cherished institutions and on Western tourists, Boyle's film
> is just the soft pillow for concerned Western viewers to plump their heads;
> surely, there's hope, when even a Muslim lad who is abused, scorned, and
> rejected can recover his dignity, win the girl and thrive in a world free of
> terror. It's precisely the India of which Westerners, starting with its
> former British masters, heartily dream, an India where everything is
> possible.
>
> The Indian reality, of course, is far more complex, and it has taken
> filmmakers of sublime artistry and a subtle grasp of the huge Indian
> spectrum like Mani Ratnam, Shonali Bose, Buddhadeb Dasgupta, Girish
> Kasaravalli, and Murali Nair to express that complexity on screen.
> Opportunities for lower classes to free themselves from the old constraints
> are indeed greater now in India than ever before, largely through the jobs
> created by the nation's exploding hightech and manufacturing sectors, which
> have literally created a middle class where one barely existed before. That
> new middle class is full of Jamals, using the new social streams fostered by
> computers and the Web to find types of work that simply never existed before
> in the Indian economy. The now infamous call centers-an aspect Boyle's film
> hardly glances at-are mere slivers of this new economy. But it is new, and
> therefore has only just begun to make its presence felt in a nation of such
> vast stretches and distances of geography, culture, religious traditions,
> and economic status.
>
> It's here that Boyle's vision of India goes truly south, since it reinforces
> his target audience's general ignorance of reference points in Indian
> cinema. An affectionate nod in an early sequence to the Bollywood spectacles
> starring Amitabh Bachchan is typical: His enduring superstar status aside,
> the particular Amitabh movies visually cited in Slumdog Millionaire are
> actually too old for Jamal- a lower-class boy born in the late Eighties-to
> have seen (except, perhaps, on videotape). The brief Amitabh film reel in
> Slumdog is more properly seen as reflective of Boyle's own personal memory
> bank of the Bollywood movies seen in his youth, and therefore useful for
> Boyle's purposes, since Amitabh remains the one Bollywood superstar widely
> known in the West. (He's also something of an insider's joke here, since he
> was the original host of the Indian Millionaire show titled, Kaun Banega
> Crorepati? (Who Will Become a Crorepati?).
>
> Slumdog Millionaire may be minor, but in one way it's important: It serves
> as the ideal vehicle for the new middlebrow's perception of what makes up
> world cinema. For starters, as a non-Indian movie with Indian actors (pros
> based in the U.K. and India, plus newcomers and nonpros), dialog, settings
> and music, it provides a comfortable substitute for a genuine Indian film
> (say, by the above-mentioned, neglected and under-seen Ratnam, Dasgupta, or
> Nair). The new middlebrow can thus say they've covered their current Indian
> cinema; after all, they've seen-and enjoyed-Slumdog Millionaire.
>
> Boyle's film has been celebrated as an expression of globalization, and it's
> certainly true that the story itself couldn't exist in a world before
> globalization took effect in once- protectionist India, and that Jamal's
> progress is globalization incarnate. But a truer manifestation of
> globalization is the explosion of world cinema itself, and how the past
> decade and a half has seen the spread of national cinemas to an unmatched
> degree in the art form's history. This has been possible only through the
> combined forces of globalization and the absorption of previous
> experimentation in film grammar and theory; the ways in which local
> filmmakers in their local conditions have responded to the challenges of
> making cinema on their own terms has made the current period probably the
> most exciting ever from a global perspective.
>
> India is an interesting example in this regard, since its many languages and
> regions have produced a wide range of filmmaking styles and voices, most of
> which continue to struggle (like Ratnam, who himself dances between more
> genres and forms than Steven Soderbergh) to be seen abroad. We're living in
> the midst of a paradoxical climate, however: Just as world cinema and its
> locally- based voices (and not glib fly-bynight tourists like Boyle) are
> more aggressively active than ever, and more exciting in their expressions,
> the outlets in the U.S. for this work are shrinking. Distributors, burned by
> too many subtitled films that bomb at the box office, have narrowed their
> shopping lists at festivals and markets. Alternative outlets, from festivals
> to payper- view, can contain only so many titles. Video is the last refuge,
> meaning that cinema made by artists ends up being seen (if at all) on TV.
>
> Boyle is obviously keenly aware of this condition in his own film about
> characters raised speaking Hindu: He manages to compress the Hindu dialogue
> into about fifteen minutes' total running time (a fraction of the full
> running time of 116 minutes), and then offer up subtitles for the Hindu in
> distractingly snazzy lines of text that dance all over the screen like a
> hyperkinetic TV ad- apparently the perfect solution for otherwise worldly
> minded folks who hate reading subtitles. In the future, Slumdog Millionaire
> might be seen as a talisman of a potentially degraded film culture, in which
> audiences were sufficiently dumbed-down to accept the fake rather than the
> real thing, and in a new middlebrow haze, weren't able to perceive the
> difference.-Robert Koehler
>
> Copyright Cineaste Spring 2009
> http://www.californiachronicle.com/articles/yb/128346053
>
> --
> regards,
> Vithur
>
