Kalpana Sharma, the author of ‘Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asian’s Largest Slum,’ in The Indian Express:
So what about our slums – constituting half of Mumbai and more than one third of most other cities in this country? Is it a bad thing that they are now the subject of films that go on to win awards? Perhaps not. Is there only one way of looking at the life of those who live in these wretched conditions? Or is it possible to show the worst but also appreciate the difference, the grit? If an “outsider” like Boyle depicts this difference, should we celebrate? Or be critical?
Slumdog Millionaire is a story, a gripping one we are told. And if through it the world gets a peek at an India inhabited by millions of people who continue to live their lives without clean water, or sanitation, or electricity, what is the problem? After all, everyone knows that even as we concentrate on fraud at the highest level in our most “shining” sector, and write about the recession that will affect the salaried class, the majority of Indians inhabit another space without the Sensex or job security.
Mumbai’s paradox is that it is often the dwellers of paradise who feel themselves in hell and the dwellers of hell who feel themselves in paradise. Anand Giridharadas in International Herald Tribune:
A woman cooking food in front of her shanty in Mumbai on Aug. 21. Photo: Arko Datta/Reuters
This city, before it was a city, was a scattered seven islands in the choppy waters off the Indian mainland. Over the years, it was reclaimed from the sea, the seven masses joining, and claimed by the teeming country at its back. Dangling off the coast, it became India’s stock-trading and film-making capital and served as its window to the world.
But if the reclaiming was complete, the claiming never was. The city was tethered to the subcontinent by a land bridge in the northern suburbs, 32 kilometers, or 20 miles, from the upper-crust stronghold of South Mumbai, where mainland India felt remote. The rich were in India but not of it. News arrived of distant floods and famines, malfeasance and malnutrition, and they told themselves that theirs was a world apart.
In The Sunday Times, Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy talk about their critically acclaimed new film, a tale of an 18-year-old orphan from the Mumbai slums who reaches the final of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?:
When we met in Toronto the day after the public screening, he was, as usual, modest and taking nothing for granted. At the same time, he knew the movie had “played” – he would have to have been comatose not to have sensed it. In fact, you could pinpoint the exact moment when the audience fell in love with it. It’s a scene a little over five minutes in. We have already seen 18-year-old Jamal (Dev Patel) in the hot seat of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, preparing to answer the last, 20-million-rupee question. We have also, jarringly, seen him brutally beaten and interrogated by a couple of deeply suspicious policemen. How can an illiterate chai boy from the slums have known so many correct answers, they want to know – is he a genius, a cheat or just plain lucky? Thereby hangs an unabashedly romantic and picaresque tale.
In the first flashback accounting for his improbable knowledge, we find the seven-year-old Jamal trapped in a wooden outhouse built on a rickety pier that overlooks a private airport. Desperate to greet his favourite Bollywood star, Jamal realises that there’s only one thing for it. He takes a deep breath and plunges into the stinking cesspool beneath the pier. Covered in crap, he walks up to the star and demands his autograph. The sequence may be shamelessly contrived, but the close correlation between money and excrement speaks volumes about India – and not just India, for that matter.
Danny Boyle’s new film ‘Slumdog Millionaire‘ will close this year’s London Film Festival. Adapted by ‘Full Monty‘ writer Simon Beaufoy from the novel ‘Q&A‘ by Vikas Swarup, ‘Slumdog Millionaire‘ tells the story of an an 18-year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai who finds himself just one question away from winning 20 million rupees ($500,000) on India’s “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”
Danny Boyle’s (Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, 28 Days Later and Sunshine) movie features an all-Indian cast including Skins star Dev Patel and Anil Kapoor. Boyle filmed ‘Slumdog millionaire’ on location on the streets of Mumbai. Music is by AR Rehman. In a story headlined “Will Slumdog Millionaire be 2008’s Juno,” the New York Observer says it is already being positioned as 2008’s “little movie that could.”
Driven by fantastic energy and a torrent of vivid images of India old and new, “Slumdog Millionaire” is a blast. Danny Boyle’s film uses the dilemma of a poor teenager suspected of cheating on the local version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” to tell a story of social mobility that is positively Dickensian in its attention to detail and the extremes of poverty and wealth within a culture…
Surging with colors, music, the ever-present swarming multitudes and the vitality of its youthful characters, the pic begins disturbingly with the sight of police torturing a young man to make him confess how he’s been able to make a run up to the ultimate prize of 20 million rupees on the nation’s most popular quizshow. “I knew the answers,” the sullen fellow insists, and Simon Beaufoy’s intricate and cleverly structured script illustrates how that came to be.
The Pool: Another world, just over the hedge
Director Chris Smith’s (American Job, The Yes Men, American Movie) movie “The Pool” takes a look at the lives of the haves and the someday might haves in Goa. A poor boy (Venkatesh Chavan) becomes obsessed with the swimming pool of a rich man (Nana Patekar) in the opulent hills of Panjim, Goa. His life gets turned upside down when he attempts to meet the mysterious family that arrives at the house. Smith transfers an Iowa-based short story by Randy Russell to India’s western Goa region -- and works in Hindi. From the New York Times:
In “The Pool,” a recurrent image that develops into a symbol of the gap between affluence and poverty shows the waiflike Indian protagonist, Venkatesh (Venkatesh Chavan), perched in a tree, gazing longingly at a private swimming pool on the other side of a hedge. A skinny, 18-year-old man-child who longs to dive into the water, Venkatesh ekes out a living cleaning hotel rooms and selling plastic bags on the street with his 11-year-old sidekick, Jhangir (Jhangir Badshah). The shimmering pool, in which no one seems to swim, is a window onto a world he can hardly imagine.
This calm, neorealist film, directed and photographed by the documentarian Chris Smith (“American Movie,” “The Yes Men,” “American Job”), blurs the line between fiction and reality. As the characters, who have the same first names as the actors playing them, amble around Panaji, the capital of Goa, you come to see them more as people living their lives than as a writer’s inventions.
