Slumdog Millionaire

India’s Bollywood film machine is colossal. Here in Blighty, it’s often easy to forget the industry’s sheer reach, entertaining billions of people throughout the subcontinent. In truth, there’s often not a lot to these films – escapism that relies on formulaic plot lines and recurring themes of love, honour and revenge. Yet such is the insatiable appetite for Indian filmi that weightier works often fail to get a look in, leaving some of the grittier ‘Indian’ films to be made by émigrés like the Canada-based Deepa Mehta or, in the case of Slumdog Millionaire, iconic British director Danny Boyle

Shot on location around Mumbai, and using several local actors, this entertaining drama is his most ambitious work to date. It opens with slum dweller Jamal Malik (British-Asian Skins actor Dev Patel) one question away from winning the top prize of 20 million rupees on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?. The show’s host, Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor), can’t accept that a ‘slumdog’ is intelligent enough to know the answers and, when the show runs out of time and breaks overnight, he has Malik arrested and carted off to the police station, accused of cheating.

Over the course of his interrogation, Jamal explains how he came to know the answers; it turns out that each question is linked to key periods in his often horrifically deprived childhood. It’s a clever narrative device, exploring what it’s like to be a Muslim slum kid in modern-day Mumbai. Indeed, the film captures the ambiguities and anomalies of a contemporary India straddling both the modern and medieval.

So we learn about Jamal’s job as a chai wallah (teaboy) in a call centre, his mother’s death at the hand’s of Hindu extremists, and see his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal) lured into a life of violence. Add to the mix Boyle’s gritty footage of the shit-infested, rubbish-clogged slum, plus Jamal and Salim being exploited as child beggars by a corrupt orphanage owner, and it’s a potent snapshot of India’s social realities.

But there’s a secondary plot: Jamal’s love interest, childhood sweetheart Latika (Freida Pinto). Lost and then found, Latika ties together the film’s different strands. But at the same time, it’s as though two films have been layered on top of each other: one edgy drama, the other a triumph-over-adversity love story. And it’s that fluffy love story that wins out in the end; the film deciding to cash in on a Bollywood happy ending complete with choreographed dance scene as the credits roll.

So even with its slick editing, stunning visuals and a catchy soundtrack from AR Rahman and MIA, it’s a movie that ultimately decides to be a feel-good fantasy about ‘destiny’ and nothing more. You decide if that’s a bad thing or not.

Ed Stocker

Anticipation:

UK directors don’t get much more iconic than Boyle.

Enjoyment:

Love, drama, violence, fantasy. Ticks a lot of boxes.

In Retrospect:

The ending doesn’t pack much of a punch.