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| Home > Slumdog millionaire: |
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An ode to the street kid |
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Review of Slumdog millionaire
The large amount of near hate, fluster and indifference that the film Slumdog Millionaire has generated among actors, cineastes and critics here in India in the past several weeks, comes with a bit of disappointment. The famous opposition to the film's showcasing of the 'dirty underbelly' of the city of Mumbai, for one, is hardly about the concern for the scenes or for the city, than it is about how the film got to the Golden Globe or the Oscars bearing such a flag post, also in something as immediate as its title. And one wonders if film-making and film-viewing is all about the meta-diegetics of stalking a film while it makes it to a certain somewhere, like school children comparing test papers and arguing for marks. How much of it is being written on the film? And then there are others who speak of the film as if it were an illegitimate offspring of the written language that maturely calls itself 'fiction', going no farther than the story and characters. Where is the whole discourse of cinema?
Slumdog Millionaire certainly causes panic for its few enduring aspects of film content and good cinema, which is, however, not quite the concern of the present article. Yet I would still give it away to the 'underbelly' factor that the film uses as a figment of its thematic argument with provocative force that reconstructs past, and often, greater artistic adjuncts. Barely thirteen minutes down and one is pushed to making a subconscious repositioning of, for instance, Joseph Conrad's "sense of lugubrious drollery"a, Harmony Korine's 1997 cult film Gummo, Bernard Shaw's theme perception on "Cruelty, Modern and Medieval"b, and the more reclaimable 1998 documentary, Lesser Humans (Venth Chetha) c by K. Stalin. And then there is the roguish happiness that Bunuel's Un Chien andalou (Andalusian Dog) is only 16 minutes long!
So, for all its otherwise 'failed cinema', there is no denying of the fact that the film begins by attempting to change the rules of observation, draws raw blood from the bowels of even the most enduring of nihilists and clearly, further demeans the reputation of the metro-sexual pink, a colour that is, historically speaking, so un-Indian or so post-Independence.
And yet the common Indian mysophobic bourgeois, even with little or no history of film education, who watches television advertisements of the Lizol and the family of Lizols, while swapping shows on Travel, Living and real estate fantasies, and at bed time searches his-her children's feet for tiny black specks before they board their beds, too could stay on to watch the film, up to the last credit listings. Several reasons. Some, as good as Rahman's music, if one actually understood music, and if one did recognize music as something quite peacefully extra-diegetic yet remarkably indispensable to the film text, as it is here, or in Fellini's 8 ½ or anywhere else, or some, as unpretentious and as incriminatingly satisfying as getting to know that the little Jamaal, generously coated in human waste, was after all, adequately washed up in the next and the rest of the frames!
And, of course, if one were of the not-so-bourgeois kind, could one really escape the wicked pleasure one derives from the American woman's irrefutably market-economy kind of a peace-making dialogue, "here's a bit of the real America, son!", and the following action of her prompting her husband in lip movement, "Money!" and his handing out the dollars scene at the Dhobi Ghat! The scene, consisting of a tight shot of the American's wallet shown as the single largest object in the frame, seems to scream out satire, though not so much for itself than for the previous shot where the husband speaks of the now so ruefully pillaged Merc having "car insurance", that makes their representing the "real America" coupled with the presence of mind of reminding the driver of yet another 'real American' solution so convincing (though it's London's Lloyd's that is known to have given the world its modern auto-insurance)! One might have some very dear friends in the far West, but it would be a ruthless lie to camouflage the sense of patri in oneself that rises like a serpent driven from sleep at the smallest occasion that resurrects the legendary East-West tussle. Especially so, when a bit of the East is done unto damnation, as it would appear to some of us here, for all the on-screen literally justifiable reasons, including the admittedly politically incorrect title.
However, in pinning the tourist couple up in the Taj Mahal scene as being more English than American, and in further making them look as naïve (I would say, rather euphemistically!) as over-sized infants while being hoodwinked on the history of the Taj by Jamaal, 'the guide', couldn't Boyle have done a balancing act, in honest acknowledgement of this thing about the prime meridian of contemporary world cinema passing through the US of A?! Or, is it, still, a neutralizing buffer that the director safely uses to ward off 'wrong readings' of his value judgments of a 'lesser-enabled' universe of people?
Well, coming back to the reasons of staying on to watch the film, I, however, found none as lyrically compelling as Boyle's own pursuits of playing up the joys of a runaway childhood.
Beginning at six minutes and twenty-three seconds real time, the slum kid-brothers Salim and Jalaam Malik mindlessly scale the high rises of emotions in the viewer, though much less in themselves, and this, in spite of witnessing their mother being caned down in a hideous act of communal violence. In the inaugural scene, they and a large band of little compatriots play cricket on a supposedly private air-strip, the "private ka land" as described by the guards in disheveled Hindi. They run with steam-engine power with the guards after their blood. Rahman steps in, in a Zulu-like war fervor, solemnly invoking the high skies for freedom and invincibility for the young renegades who can call you back "Dog!" in a kind of bestial 'gaminerie'd. The acrobat cameraman at his agile best, drives along the feet of the little Malik brothers through the darting labyrinth of an exceedingly squalid hutment area caught in a riot of camera angles, eventually widening up to an aerial satellite shot of a large fraction of the 175-hectare Dharavi slum, that houses an otherwise unimaginable quantum of wasted polymers and humans.
Of the Man-kid and the musketeer
Though mobility is the key word in most of the next forty minutes of the Salim-Jamaal childhood, the inaugural scene forecasts, with preface-like certainty, the film's greatest testament on the slum child - slum-bred adult equation, where the child clearly emerges the vainqueur and the adult, the impoverished and, in more contextual terms, the exterminated. The slum kid spins out reproaches in alarmingly salacious adult slang Hindi, stops in the middle of a chase and turns around to make lewd gests, and, understands 'money'. And so, the celebration of free and unrelenting childhood runs subterranean to most of the story, though several macabre trails that seem to, from title to tail, lust for cruelty, certainly cause serious consternations about the little brothers' fate, moment by moment.
We have the children and the chase. Yet this is not Truffaut on the run and these are not his long travellings stalking the one and many escapades of young Antoine Doinel, or of his "Mistons" or the "Mischief-mongers" of the eponymous 1957 short film, that nothing but transcribes images from a long kept diary, telling you in first-person-plural voice-over of a certain nymph named Bernadette, of the first pangs of pre-adolescent eroticism and of the first puffs of cigarette - a crossover to manhood.
This is about the emergence of a certain Man-kid who survives a manhunt.
While Les Mistons never meant to be any more than a little provincial tale, episodic in nature, first told in a short story by Maurice Pons, it would be significant to note that Boyle still lets in a similar kind of cheer-leader essence that is expressly certified in the mischievous "They can't touch me" opening refrain, much like in the concluding mis-en-abîme look of Antoine Doinel in Les quatre cents coups (400 Blows). Speaking of which, faint momentary attempts at intertextual references to Truffaut make clear appearances on the screen. One of them is of the 1844 French classic, Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, as a parallel to the reference to Balzac in Doinel's provincial schooling, the latter being more logical to the 50s' French curriculum. Boyle and Tandon cash in on a revealing paradox that could exist in the sight-less Indian school curriculum, and dare to think of including an English translation of the French classic as the one which is being taught to a remote huddled-up class, somewhere in the heart of an Indian megapolis, itself bewildered by the road-side rape of its own 'vernacular' tongues! Salim: "Vaise, theesri musketeer ka naam kis saale ko patha hai?" (Who the bloody hell would know the name of the third musketeer?) And, incidentally, Boyle and Tandon take nothing except the game-show and slum-born-contestant theme and the question on the invention of the revolver from Vikas Swarup's otherwise pathetically predictable book, Q&A.
But the reference is meatier for its connotative value than for its intertextual content.
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“Athos” |
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“Porthos?” |
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"Haan. Jab mein bolu, tab." (Yeah. Just when I say), instructs Salim, to his brother |
whom he's come to fetch for the diabolic blinding process that he has just witnessed while it was carried out on little Arvind who would soon earn double as much in the beggar-children squad. The plan is little understood till Salim throws the acid on the "Fat bastard" conman of the beggar-master Mamman, instead of burning off his brother Jamaal's eyes as was assigned. "Run Jamaal, Run!" The three children run. Quick cuts and some frenetic string music, all pressing against an almost disgustfully weakening dread in the viewer, who now shares the young fugitives' disemboweling misery. As if fleeing the Jurassic age monsters or, the other-worldly Predator e, in poor night light and menacingly unpredictable Amazonian vegetation. The two young musketeers make it to the northern-bound moving train, but return to Mumbai in adolescence for the girl that Jamaal lost that night. The girl is traced and saved, as Salim eliminates Mamman with a Colt-45, only to turn desi Bond Gunmaster G-9 f and order Jamaal to leave at point blank.
An apology of the oxymoron
Lessons from Mira Nair's 1988 Salaam Bombay are those of crude barbarous truths of the city. Krishna or Chai-pauv (Tea-bread), left behind jobless by the ambulant circus company, neither gets to earn the elusive Rs. 500 nor manages to convince Solah Saal, an adolescent girl forced into prostitution, to run away with him. Like in the end the city overpowers young Krishna, pre-liberalisation India had larger configurations that prevailed over the individual. Information revolution got the slum boys go to English-medium school, read or simply hear out readings and make wild estimations of the three musketeers, grow up to speak flawless English while a cognizable majority of educated urban Indians, still seek special help in the language just as Paris and Munich have individuals and institutions teaching English, especially the Wall Street way. The grownup Jamaal wouldn't know the national slogan, "Satyameva Jayate" (Truth alone triumphs) or the portrait-sketch that is printed on a 1000-rupee note, and has only "heard" of Gandhiji, but has enough soft skills to handle a customer calling from Edinburough, to locate his brother in less than fifteen seconds from the company database, all, as effortlessly as he graduates from hanging down from a ceiling to a state of being given a patient hearing by some two savage cops, of the first-person account of his Mumbai meanderings. There sure seems to be a play of destiny, and Boyle sees it as a larger destiny playing over the dynamics of an astoundingly receptive nation.
And there though, Slumdog Millionaire sings out a hymn in the name of the abstract contrasts that Indians symbolize all at once. In that case, has one to rewrite the constitution of miserable-urban and 'civilized'-urban living?! The proverbially parochial perception that dirt and destitution are not exactly incompatible with keen interest and intelligence and so existed in the rarest of situations that needed to be celebrated, was a common perception up until the 80s since the time when Gandhi met Irwin in 1931, as the "little half-naked Indian" who knew the English language like the back of his palm, if knowing the English language meant anything at all. The contrasts remain, but are much less antithetical and much more elusive now, argues Boyle.
Slumdog millionaire = Poor millionaire. 'Poor' millionaire?
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"What the hell can a slumdog possibly know?" |
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“The answers.” (spits) |
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“I - knew - the - answers.” |
The spitting is instantly reminiscent of a certain hierarchical superiority among the people of the pavement where the spitter defines control over a group of subhumans that he puts on various on-road jobs as in the grim visuals of the new-age Hindi films such as Madhur Bhandarkar's 'Traffic Signal' or 'Page Three', that have otherwise no understanding of the 'powerful' street kid. So, in wanting to bail out the slum kid from the rampant image of a 'victim', by means of yet another oxymoronic combination, Slumdog Millionaire identifies the robust action-hero in the doings of the waif-thin silhouettes of the young brothers.
Mucky-attired, earning a living in trains and sleeping on train tops fearless of the dangers of falling off and of separation, like Gavroche and the other two Thénardier sons who eventually fall asleep, undeterred by the devouring army of rats, in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables! With "sticks n stones n weed n bones", this is Rush Hour fantasy for the Man-kid action-hero. While Salim picks up the patent Indiana Jones rope, Jamaal dons it to hang head-down from the train top to steal chapattis through the window of the moving train. Hey, didn't Ethan Hunt hang upside down from the centre of a skyscraper in Shanghai to steal the Rabbit's Foot in Mission Impossible -3?! Young Jamaal, swearing by his unimpeachable devotion to the phantasmagoric Amitabh Bachchan, jumps down fearlessly into an open shit-swamp of a slum with a toilet-to-person ratio of 1: 1500, and rises in miniature brute force, like the indomitably pernicious Spinosaurus, that rises up in the dark Costa Rican waters.
But, what punches you right in the face is a certain calcification of the heart that the boys evince at their mother's death. They seem to do nothing but watch over their neighbourhood set ablaze, from a distant elevated spot. A certain Brechtian alienation appropriated in live-wire images. Not a tear, but speechless fear and perplexity. One of the million rebirths of an everyday Indian gosse de rue (street kid), that tears emotions apart as if the poor knew none of it. Like Luce Abélès says in his article, "Le gamin de Paris", (The street urchin of Paris) (Cahiers-Musée d'art et d'essai, 1985, 11), the street kid is "the voice of the miserable". For all the lamentation of a residual habitation burnt down at the snap of a finger, in a country that seems to be just as famous for its religious animosity, Boyle wouldn't let his protagonists melt away in the heat of the blaze. He lends them the adult gaze of indifference and the challenge of running the business of life.
When the Man-kid grows up
Turn to Jamaal the "call-centre assistant" or in 'W2'Millionaire?' anchor, Prem's own words, "the assistant phone- basher". Eighteen-year-old Jamaal Malik is hung like beef in cold storage. Yet in the foreground, his arms, tied up, run over his ears and the biceps bulge, just as Srinivas says "He's a tough guy". The film begins in medias res, interspersed with banal police conversations, mayhem and torture. Jamaal finally qualifies to sit down and testify for his answering at the Millionaire contest. The contest scenes come in with an agenda of the grotesque, minus the buffoonery, to ease tension like in Senecan tragedies overwrought with howling malevolent scenes. Mostly seated on the hot seat, and image-wise motionless or immobile, the childhood fluidity is certainly lost on the screen and so is the action and its galloping music. There is a grip of fear at the questions, that knock on memories, nostalgic of a now gruesome, now debonaire past. Pursuit of happiness in pursuit of love or pursuit of money has softened and tamed the raw destiny of the boys who were once, not long ago, murderously pushed off a moving training.
A saving grace, though, is the film's stark denial of the position Vikas Swarup takes in his book, that his publisher so fervently calls "Formerly Q&A". In the book, Jamaal Malik is no Jamaal Malik. Instead he takes a ludicrously conspicuous name, Ram Mohammed Thomas, so much like the name of a primary school one-act play on national integration! And as Swarup puts it, in what he calls 'Prologue' one wouldn't know by what degree, Thomas is a "hapless resident", a "penniless waiter" who's whole existence is 'illegal'. Not once do we get a glimpse of any such self-commiseration in the Boyle-Tandon characters. Further, Simon Beaufoy's screenplay takes a whacky turn, eliminates long and languorous episodes that educate Thomas of the answers, the wasteful melodrama in the dramatic breaking-in of a certain Smita Shah or the erstwhile 'Gudiya' of the slum, now a lawyer who fights for Thomas "like a mother fighting for her child" and several other unrelatable nothings like the new-fangled hero 'Arman Ali", dated theories of the urban 'food chain', etc. Outside the main trail of the story, one wonders how Transworld Random House did a Jules et Jim coverg for the post-film reprint!
The name and religion in Jamaal Malik or in the scene where young Latika is seen in half-profile, presumably writing out something in Urdu with a coin, squatting in the open in a downpour on the night of the riots, would reflect upon the truth that antagonism is not really as much about religion as it would be of nationalism that is none other than an extension of the self. Well, as for the boys, Salim the adolescent Gunmaster G-9 still remains 'Terminator'. He kills Javed before he gives himself up at the altar of the entailing gunfire and fury, laying himself in the grave-like bathtub that he has prepared with one-thousand-rupee bills. Jamaal, the more textured, wins the contest, builds up a following and gets back Latika.
The inevitable conclusion of the film, much of which slips into mediocre categorizations, hardly seems to qualify for any further comment. The fact certainly is that, the film dies down slowly and steadily after the street kid ceases to exist.
Therefore, notwithstanding the one and many laxities of the film, the driveling and so typically speech-act kind of responses to it, not only reduce the film to a mere socio-economic reality, but also push its largely unorthodox treatment of the image of the street kid to a certain brink of extinction. And hey, who wants to be in Eden for all its infuriating tailored uniformity? And for those who still want to, here's what Mike Davish finds out, unintentionally though, with a 'quantum of solace' in his book Planet of Slums: that the slum concentration in India is among the least populated of the 32-something slum colonies of the world. For this and for better art-etiquette, to think it's about playing down a country's reputation is as bawdy as to be walking away after the show wondering if the film was digital or celluloid, or as armchair as using Godard's Masculin Féminin to teach the past perfect of French verbs.
However, democracy is as true to reception as it is to creation. Black reigns where pink stays and somewhere on moving train tops, reigns the street kid smiling ear-to-ear in an indefatigable joie de vivre.
Chandranandinee Tushar-Iyengar
Notes:
a. |
Joseph Conrad's 1899 novel, Heart of Darkness, p. 21, OUP, 1995. |
b. |
G. George Bernard Shaw in the Preface to his play Saint Joan, p. 36, Orient Longman, 1995. Saint Joan on the life and trial of Joan of Arc was premiered on the 28th of December 1923 in New York City, after the canonization of Joan of Arc on the 16th of May 1920. |
c. |
Documentary made on the 'Bhangis' (toilet cleaners), of the dalit ('untouchable') caste. |
d. |
French, meaning "playfulness, mischievousness" Robert-Collin, 2002. As one would have it, one of the best screen interpretations of the substantive would be the 1895 L'arroseur arrosé (The gardener watered) by Louis Lumière in the Lumière series |
e. |
The 1987 eponymous film directed by John McTiernan on an alien monster. With Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers and Elpidia Carrillo. |
f. |
Presumably referring to the 1979 Mithun Chakraborthy-starrer Hindi film, Suraksha Gunmaster G-9 directed by Raveekant Nagaich |
g. |
While the film premiered in 1962, the cover of the post-1962 reprints of the 1953 novel Jules et Jim by Henri Pierre Roché bears the film-poster photograph of the three actors, Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, Henri Serre. |
h. |
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums « Le pire des mondes possibles : de l'explosion urbaine au bidonville global »], La Découverte, Paris, 2006, (p. 31.) |
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Chandranandinee Tushar-Iyengar is Doctoral Scholar - Cinematographic Studies, University of Provence, France and University Teacher- French Cinema and Literature, University of Bangalore. ctiyen@gmail.com
The reviewer has produced an 'inter-textual' celebration of Slumdog Millionaire but here are a few other issues to be examined:
1. |
The film is 'truthful' about Mumbai/ India. Or, to put it differently, since everything is generally held to be possible in Mumbai/ India, one cannot assert with confidence that the film is 'exaggerating' matters. Still, it is difficult to consent to the claim that the Indian police would routinely torture someone who cheats at a game - since that is not a cognizable offence. |
2. |
The film is not targeted at Indians but at audiences in the West/ USA. The emotions it gets out of middle-class Indians - largely shame - is perhaps not intended. What is perhaps intended is that audiences in USA will feel pity for people in whose misery they have not played a part. It would be difficult, for instance, for American audiences to feel pity for Iraqi children because they might see themselves as culpable. Americans might experience shame when witnessing the sad plight of Iraqi children, which would be difficult to exploit commercially. |
3. |
The film is made in English and expects us to accept the fact that its characters would speak it although English is the language of the privileged in India. This might be acceptable except for one thing. The protagonist works in a call centre and knows enough English to substitute for someone else at a crucial moment. The body language of the characters is hardly that of the class they are meant to represent and Indian audiences recognize it immediately. If the film is 'celebratory', it is as celebratory as a Bollywood film in which a poor man rises to affluence - only to discover that he is actually a millionaire's lost son. |
4. |
Oscar juries are generally not educated enough to judge screenplays, music, cinematography, direction and editing independently. It would be difficult for them to assert that while the film is not particularly good, the music or direction still stands out. Films that make an impression overall also get these awards as some kind of additional bonus. AR Rehman getting the award/ nomination for Best Music for his work should be seen in this light. |
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