The truth about Slumdog

Is the film British or Indian in sensibility? Amit Roy debates

The truth about Slumdog

Is the film British or Indian in sensibility? Amit Roy debates

AS Slumdog Millionaire opens in India after unprecedented worldwide hype, the film raises a number of questions, including some fundamental ones about whether Indian cinema can make it on to the global stage.

Will it be a hit in India? Does it matter if it is not? Does it mark the triumph of Bollywood in the west after years and years of being ignored in preference to the work of someone like Satyajit Ray, as Amitabh Bachchan appears to be suggesting in his blog? Or is this a collaboration between Bollywood and Hollywood? Is this movie British or Indian?

First things first. Maximum marks are due to Vikas Swarup. After all, it is his novel, Q&A, which has been adapted into the film. Now, the poor man is having to suffer the indignity of having his best-selling novel reissued, not as Q&A, but renamed as Slumdog Millionaire and with the stars from the film, Dev Patel and Freida Pinto, on the cover. It is almost as though he has written the book of the film, rather the film being adapted from his book.

Sometimes, when you see a movie you know instinctively that it has cinematic force. This was my sense after seeing Slumdog Millionaire for the first time when it was screened at the London Film Festival. It had also been well received when shown earlier at the Toronto Film Festival.

As we emerged into Leicester Square after the London screening, I had a couple of reservations. First, I felt that when the credits rolled, Swarup was not given sufficient recognition for the book. To be sure, his name was included, but if you blinked you could miss it. His name should have been projected right at the start, not thrown in as an also ran.

Secondly, Swarup had chosen the name of his central character, Ram Mohammed Thomas, with great deliberation to be almost a metaphor for the religious diversity of India. But the director, Danny Boyle, and the screenplay writer, Simon Beaufoy, nurtured no doubt on all the trouble that is being caused in the UK by a section of the country's Muslim population, decided to inject a jarring element of Hindu-Muslim conflict into their rewriting of Swarup's story.

It would be dishonest to ignore the religious tensions that do exist in India but it was not strictly necessary to make them an important aspect of the film and countenance Ram Mohammed Thomas's forced conversion to Jamal Malik.

"I see it as an honour for India," enthused A R Rahman, after picking up a Golden Globe. It is only reflected honour, though. Others may not agree but Rahman has done more distinctive and distinguished work in other films.

However, it is worth stressing that this is not an Indian film Slumdog Millionaire is a British film with an Indian cast. At best, it could be characterised as British-Indian collaboration for it was shot in India with quite a lot of Indian crew and help.

However, it is emphatically not a Bollywood movie though Doyle has introduced what he considers to be elements of Bollywood. For example, in the romance between Malik and Latika, played by a relative newcomer, Freida Pinto, as well in the song-and-dance sequence shot in VT station for the end credits.

Swarup deserves much praise for coming up with the original concept of a boy from the slums who is able to answer difficult questions because the queries connect with events in his life. Some are tragic "I wish I did not know the answer to this question," he responds to a query that recalls the slaughter of his mother at the hands of a Hindu mob while others are more entertaining. However, the questions that are in the novel are not in the film.

This change is understandable. There are plots in the novel that, in the opinion of the director, were not suitable for transition to the screen. It was entirely permissible for him to take the artistic licence necessary for a successful adaptation of Q&A.

Bollywood, had it been let loose on Q&A, would have made a very different film, which might have been almost as much fun for the most part but the jokes would have been heavy-handed most probably. In any case, it is unlikely that a Bollywood version would have appealed to non-Indians.

Therefore, it is just as well to recognise Slumdog Millionaire for what it is a British film that reflects British cinematic genius. There is a cringe making scene when a small boy has to wade though a pond of human excreta because he is determined to gain access to Amitabh Bachchan who is shooting a Hindi movie in his locality (hence the slum boys know the answer to the question, "Who is the lead in Zanjeer?") While others hold their noses and move away, it is to the credit of Bachchan that he signs a photograph held up by the boy.
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Of course, we don't see the character playing Bachchan, just his impeccable cuffs.

It is just as well that neither Bachchan nor Shah Rukh Khan got the role of the quizmaster for Anil Kapoor has acquitted himself well without hijacking the film. For the main role, it is telling that Doyle had to return to London to find Dev Patel India could not give him a good enough slum kid.

What makes the movie is its humour, which is often understated British humour in an Indian setting. I won't spoil the film by writing about the hilarious Taj Mahal sequence when one of the rascals from the slums acts as a tour guide for an unsuspecting foreign couple.

Those able to compare the differing British and Indian styles of movie making with an open mind and I have now seen Slumdog... twice will conclude this is a British film, directed in a quintessentially British way by a British director.

The suggestion that foreigners have warmed to the film because it shows the slums of India Shining, of a country which is on its way to becoming an economic superpower and is giddy with a sense of its enhanced position in the new world order, is nonsense. Audiences love the film because they love the film. They are not bothered about whether this is a correct projection of an India with 9 per cent GDP. The editing is fast films are never edited in this brisk manner in India and Doyle has audiences at his mercy because he manages to make them cry one moment (the scenes in the police station, when Malik is tortured to ascertain whether he has been cheating, are quite shocking) and laugh the next.

The choice of Freida Pinto is also revealing. Bollywood would never have picked her for she has the kind of looks which appeals more to westerners. Slumdog Millionaire is Doyle's film in the way that Gandhi has always been Richard Attenborough's.

Amitabh Bachchan should look at the movie again and tell directors in Bollywood: "Take it away and study it and see how a script should be written, a cast put together and a movie directed and edited. Why can't we do something like this?"

(By arrangement with The Telegraph)

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