Slumdog Millionaire

A strong contender for the Best Film award at the Oscars, Slumdog Millionaire is Danny Boyle’s latest offering.

Danny Boyle, the iconic British director best known for films such as Trainspotting or A Life less Ordinary, has made a film that is shot in the slums of Mumbai and of course the sets of the very popular TV game show, Who wants to be a Millionaire.

Based on the book Q and A by Vikas Swarup, Slumdog Millionaire is the story of Jamaal Malik, a slum dweller and later a chai wala at a call centre who ends up as a contender on Who wants to be a Millionaire. The narrative style of the film is excellent as it intricately links each correct answer to an episode of Jamaal’s poverty stricken past.

The film does well because of its characters but lacks the rawness and the grit that Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay was able to bring to the screen.

But then again Slumdog Millionaire is an optimistic rags to riches story but most importantly the secondary plot of the film which shows Jamaal’s quest for his childhood love, Latika, takes over and turns the film into a love story that ends well.

There are innumerable rave reviews of Slumdog Millionaire online but I recently read a review by Ed Stocker, who in his piece sets the tone by saying that because Indian films predominantly still use recurring themes of love, honour and revenge and still follow a formula which caters for escapism, a lot of the ‘weightier’ films either do not get noticed or are made by the South Asian diaspora (Deepa Mehta, Mira Nair, etc) or by foreign film makers like Danny Boyle in the case of Slumdog Millionaire.

I do agree with Stocker in regards to the more realist Indian cinema not getting enough due at the box offiece but I disagree with him in the recurring themes that he has so deftly summarised and pointed out.

The films made in the 1990’s were mostly about love, honour and revenge but thematically the Indian Film Industry has diversified immensely in the last decade and has become so much more progressive. We now see recurring themes of alienation (Swades) or about identity (Rang De Basanti)

Omkara, a film based on Shakespeare’s Othello bautifully portrays the struggle and greed for power in a small village run by ‘political enforcers’ It unleashes the wrath of vicious and consuming jealousy and defies all notions of a ‘hero’ being equitable to ‘good’

Anyhow, I have decided to do mini showcases on some of the excellent films that were made by the Indian Film Industries, just to highlight how the Indian Film Industry is no longer just about escapism.