On Fantastical Slumdogs
By Anindita Ghose • Jan 12th, 2009 • Category: CultureIn conversations with some of my favorite film critics about Slumdog Millionaire here in the United States, I’ve been gently asked to “watch the film as a fairytale.” A potent metaphor since, in many ways, the film’s meteoric rise and success is in itself something of a fairytale. It’s difficult to imagine now that the film was almost headed for a straight-to-DVD release after Warner Independent, the studio that had the film, closed down due to the Wall Street crisis. It was only then that Fox Searchlight came into the scene like a white knight.
When I attended its New York premiere in the first week of November last year, it had already been to several festivals and had its fair share of internet brouhaha. Eventually, every major American publication with the exception of the New Yorker was fawning all over it. But it hadn’t been branded with the definitive Oscar gold. I have genuine empathy for my friends back in India who didn’t have the opportunity to see Slumdog Millionaire simply as a movie. Because by the time of its Indian theatrical release on January 23, it wasn’t just a movie. It was a cinematic ambassador that came with an impressive baggage of adulation: Ten Oscar nominations (and another 47 wins and 32 nominations as it stands now).
Those who couldn’t quite digest Danny Boyle’s genre-hopping mish-mash movie kept their views to themselves. That is till Indian veteran actor Amitabh Bachchan (there are temples to his name, really) created something of a furor with his blog posting about the film portraying India as a “third world dirty underbelly.” He has since denied ownership of that comment and kissed and made up with Boyle.
For the most part, whatever criticism the film has garnered in India is in agreement with Bachchan’s point (arguably, not his point). The fact that slum unions in India have protested against the film’s title (”We don’t want to be called dogs”) and Hindu nationalist groups have rallied against the communal riot scene seems slightly overdone. But it probably doesn’t help that screenwriter Simon Beaufoy reacts to the heated protests against the title with a nonchalant: “I just made up the word.” Boyle, too, on being asked if he thinks his garbage-laced cinematic landscape is a colonial rendition of India says, “It’s probably true.”
Perhaps it isn’t fair to weave all of this into the evaluation of the movie itself. I really wouldn’t have if at the Q&A after the premiere, Boyle hadn’t said he referred to Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City as a Bible during the making of the film. By saying that he implies attempting a realistic portrayal when all he should really say now is: “It’s a movie. It’s make-believe. Excuse the errors. And everyone please shut up.” The movie attempts realism at parts and then jumps jerkily into fantasy fiction in Bollywood’s endearing and tested style.
Which is fine: I believe in filmic fairytales. Yet, I expect to be led into a fairytale world with characters that are consistent. How can an Indian sit through the film without wondering how Hindi speaking slum kids metamorphose first into convent-school English-speaking teenagers and then into British-accented adults? How can the teenage Jamal not know the Taj Mahal while being well-versed with The Three Musketeers?
I understand when the international viewer doesn’t get this fallacy. Case in point: Memoirs of a Geisha (2005),`set in Japan, caused considerable anger among Japanese audiences who protested against the principal characters in the film being Chinese. Actresses Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi were chosen to play the leads because they were somewhat known in Hollywood and it would make it easier to market the film. But because of my general ignorance and inability to perceive anthropological differences (Oh, you can’t either!), this huge shortcoming did nothing to interrupt my aesthetic appreciation of the movie. I’d assume it’s the same here. The factual errors so glaring to a discerning Indian viewer are unperceived by the international award-bestowing boards.
So disclosing India’s “underbelly” is not what I’m up against. I’m genuinely confused if the movie I saw and the one receiving all this praise are the same. I loved Boyle’s earlier films: Trainspotting (that’s easy), Millions, The Beach. While Slumdog’s music and cinematography are fabulous, I wasn’t expecting a poor imitation of Bollywood’s happy-ending format from him. Numerous sequences were imitations too: Jamal jumping into a pool of shit had a parallel in Schindler’s List
; Slum lords training one kid to round up the others rang back to Blood Diamond . And these were both in the first one-third—undoubtedly the best part of the movie.
At a much delayed Diwali party here in December, I ended one of my many Slumdog barbie fairytopia divx movie online laments with a “How can anyone not see through the Taj Mahal scene as a trap? It’s so clearly made for a Western audience…” A woman stopped biting into her samosa at that (which is a commendable feat, considering the lack of a good samosa here in New York) and stared at me incredulously: “But of course it’s a film made for a Western audience. A Brit director, an American distribution house … You are not the target audience.”
Right, of course. How naïve of me.
Anindita Ghose is is a writer from Bombay, India and a 2009 graduate of Columbia University's School of Journalism.
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Oddly, the same comments could be made about the film Australia, which, while made in Australia, and starring Australians, got so many things wrong, or glossed over various complicated ideas, or combined concepts together, that it was a bit of a joke to actual Australians like myself. And it was too rah-rah patriotic in places, which is something we aren’t all that familiar with outside Australia Day.
It can work when a country tries to ‘do’ another country. Slumdog Millionaire doesn’t seem like it did, and neither did Australia. A pity.
(And as a side-note: I’ve read articles accusing Slumdog Millionaire of being ‘poverty porn’, using neatly stylised versions of poor India and the always happy endings that are present during a life lived in poverty, for the satisfaction of Western audiences. Another complaint, I suppose.)
How much of this is a general problem with movies, that they tend to take literary licenses that are often dreadfully inaccurate? This sort of thing is certainly exasperating - I was appalled for days from the “New York” accents from the first episodes of CSI:NY, and that’s even where we are relatively close to being the target audience - but I wonder how fair it is to expect any sort of consistency from fictional film. I wonder if the difference between, say, a movie like the Gladiator and Slumdog Millionaire or Australia isn’t that one is more inaccurate than the other but rather that you know one better than the other, and the latter feels like it’s lying about yourself. I haven’t seen either Slumdog or Australia yet, but it seems from both of your descriptions that part of what is annoying about it is that it could be seen by others as being inaccurate, that the mistakes were limited enough that one has to be immersed in the culture to see the tiny errors, so the lies or the mistakes will be believed.
Damian, I get what you’re saying. Haven’t watched Australia yet though. Was severely warned against it though the warnings weren’t substantiated.
I’ve been speaking to filmmakers about Slumdog and they mostly retort saying directors haven’t taken on the onus of being true to life. Like you, Daniel, Raquel pointed out Almodovar’s fantastic films. He uses actors from different regions in Spain but we simply can’t discern that. And it doesn’t seem to prick simply because of the nature of his films. I do think good filmmakers, especially ones who’re claiming to expose history or an underrepresented part of the world, cannot afford to take such liberties.
Lars Von Trier and the other proponents of the DOGMA movement wanted to rid film of its artifices: excessive lighting, editing, technicalities. But they retained what was important: language, accents, costumes. He had linguists train villagers for a consistent accent in Breaking the Waves. I guess good cinema has spoilt me.
((( “How can anyone not see through the Taj Mahal scene as a trap? It’s so clearly made for a Western audience…” )))
Except it comments on the Taj Mahal as a ‘trap’ for westrerners in the kids interaction with westerners who they hustle there. How can you not see that?
Satyajit Ray was bullied by Indians who resented the universal art he created and the success he had. You see remnants of the same knee jerk response amongst some Indians today. Thankfully, that’s not the whole story, and things have matured a little. Slumdog Millionaire is a great, inspiring movie that transforms and transcends its influences, and diminshes its pettiest critics.
I am Indian, by the way.
Pablo: You’re right, the sequence is a comment on the western preoccupation with the Taj Mahal. But there’s also the bit about the kid not knowing what the structure was ( “Is this a dream?”) which was rather ridiculous. It was a poor Indian slum kid thinking aloud what an American viewer was perhaps wondering.
I had a knee jerk reaction to the film back in November. And part of confronting art is an unconsolidated, knee jerk reaction. Three months later I’ve tried to explain to myself why the film seemed wrong. Anyhow, eliciting extreme reactions on either side of the spectrum is a mark of powerful art, cinema included. So Slumdog MIllionaire wins on those grounds. That said, people can choose to be on either side.
And comparing Ray’s painstakingly researched, nuanced movies to this one–when I’m arguing precisely about its inconsistencies– is sort of ironical.
I couldn’t care less if the audience is Western, Eastern, Northern or Martian. The quality of a film, even after accounting for differences in the cultural background of audiences, must necessarily be judged as an absolute. Slumdog is just an incredibly bad film, period.
Like Anindita, I grew up in India, and like her, I don’t have a problem with the depiction of poverty in an urban Indian slums. In fact I thought the poverty was the only realistic aspect in the entire film. Other than that, it’s very sloppy direction from start to finish, a story that, even if I bought the ‘fairy tale’ line (which I don’t), is non-sensical in an entirely absolute sense (i.e., for Westerners as well), some absurd sequences (the pool of shit scene, to mention just one - in Schindler’s List a young Jew boy did it to escape the gas chamber, in Slumdog the boy does it to get his movie idol’s autograph!) and finally, a totally untrue characterization of India (other than the poverty). Whoever said that directors don’t have to be true to reality must have alluded to the obvious element of creative license granted to any artist, and not the wholesale distortion of both actual events and the lifestyle of a community of people.
Oh, and I disagree that Slumdog ‘wins’ as powerful art because it elicited extreme reactions. If it hadn’t been for the absurd number of awards, very few might have bothered to see the film, let alone talk about it.
Finally, it was painful to see Ray’s name being mentioned in the same breath as Slumdog’s.
Tell me about it.
I had planned to title my article “Slumdog Millionaire: Are We All Watching the Same Movie?”, but it was deemed too long by test audiences. I can’t help getting annoyed everytime the film picks up an award (including, hold your breath, BEST ENSEMBLE from the Screen Actor’s Guild; this without individual nominations for any of the actors). Now I know how all those ‘Crash’-haters felt.
Correction: Dev Patel had a nod from the SAGs. On a separate note, I was amazed that ‘Doubt’, ALL of whose players were nominated, failed to win best ensemble. It seems almost not to make arithmetic sense.