*Slumming it to the Oscars
*
*By Raja Murthy*
The rags-to-riches story of a Mumbai slum-dweller has taken Hollywood by
storm. It has not only won four Golden Globe awards but music director A R
Rahman became also the first Indian to receive such honour. The movie has
now been nominated for 10 awards at the Oscars.
When British director Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire won four Golden
Globe awards on January 11 night, it was like a scripted final scene in the
hope-for-happiness India-themed film that is earning worldwide applause not
seen since Richard Attenborough's Gandhi or Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay.
The $15 million Slumdog, shot mostly in Mumbai with an Indian cast, was the
underdog David beating the Goliath of a $150 million film starring Brad Pitt
- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - for the Best Picture award at the
66th Golden Globe Awards in Los Angeles.
Slumdog Millionaire: A Triumph for South Asians Everywhere boasted the MTV
website, celebrating Doyle's effort that has already won over 60 awards
since its release in November 2008. "This film seems unstoppable for the
rest of the awards season," predicted Entertainment Weekly critic Dave
Karger in his 'Oscar Watch' column.
Gandhi won eight Oscars in 1983 and Slumdog Millionaire now expects to head
into the Academy Awards nominations include best picture, direction, on
February 22 with 10 nominations, adding to its four Golden Globes won in all
four categories nominated - best film, Doyle for best director, Simon
Beaufoy for best screenplay and iconic Indian music maker Allah Rakkha
Rahman for the best original score. The cinematography, film editing. On top
of it all, Rahman nominated for three Oscars, including best music (original
score).
Forty-three-year-old Rahman, who collaborated with Andrew Lloyd Webber in
the Broadway musical Bombay Dreams and was dubbed the "Mozart of Madras" by
Time magazine, became the first Indian to win a Golden Globe, the annual
awards instituted in 1943 by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
Rahman's haunting Dreams on Fire score in the film, rendered by Suzanne
D'Mello, appears headed to become one of the smash hits of 2009.
Based on diplomat-turned-writer Vikas Swarup's first-person novel, Q and A,
published in 2005 and translated into 36 languages, Slumdog Millionaire
tells the grime and guts story of an 18-year-old Mumbai orphan Jamal Malik
(Dev Patel) from Dharavi, Asia's largest slum. Jamal wins 20 million rupees
($409,540) on India's version of the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire TV show,
en route to searching for Latika (Freida Pinto), the girl he loves and has
lost in Mumbai.
Swarup, currently based in Pretoria, South Africa as India's Deputy High
Commissioner, published his second novel Six Suspects in July 2008 and has
already sold its film rights.
The movie version of his first novel, of which Swarup has expressed
satisfaction, offers viewers a taste of the bitter-sweet and electric masala
that crackles through Mumbai, one of the world's most lively yet complex
cities. Director Doyle has called Slumdog Millionaire an "Ode to Mumbai".
Lancashire-born Doyle, 52, who was stopped by a priest from becoming a
priest ("I don't know if he was trying to save me or the priesthood"),
churned out the latest creative effort to crack the character code of
Mumbai, a mystery that is an enigma of hope wrapped in infectious energy,
and a riddle Mumbaikars have yet to credit anyone with for solving.
Doyle may have made some headway, having told a television interviewer he
was "destined" to make the film and that he has tried to deal with the
reality of "kamma" and "change", deep-rooted in Asian life, as in an ocean -
"the waves are changing constantly but the ocean is still there".
If Dominic Lappierre's bestseller, based in Kolkata, was called City of Joy,
Slumdog Millionaire can get by with its lyrical legend of Mumbai as the
"City of Hope".
However, Roland Joffe's movie version of City of Joy, starring Patrick
Swayze, flopped in India and Doyle's Slumdog Millionaire "Ode to Mumbai" may
get a less enthusiastic reception in India than it did in the US and Europe.
Movies in India play their designated song, dance and fantasy role, offering
viewers an escape from the over-crowded grimness of life, and movies with
strong doses of ugly realities - as both City of Joy and Slumdog Millionaire
have - are doomed to strike jarring notes at Indian box offices.
Yet Indian - or Asian - eyes outside movie halls are well-equipped to cope
with the harsh realities of poverty because life is not seen as being
single-dimensional. Real life in the slums of Jamal and Latika's life, while
holding suffering, also sees the joy of often unselfish sharing of whatever
little one has.
The smiles that shine through suffering, as seen from the six slum children
of Slumdog Millionaire, can mystify any culture seeing money and physical
comforts as the root of all happiness, instead of as an impermanent state
subject to change.
"I am amazed how street children here can still laugh and be so cheerful
compared to THE underprivileged children in the West," a Western aid worker
told this correspondent many years ago over a cup of tea under the late
afternoon sunshine in Mumbai.
Having lived homeless in the streets of Kolkata and Mumbai, it was easier to
smile in reply than explain to her the exhilarating freedom that comes with
having little to lose, a painful yet pain-free life, a gruesome yet
gratifying spirit of the streets that Slumdog Millionaire tries to capture
through Jamal's life of hope out of hardship.
"Polarities jar from the start," says movie critic Jonathan Romney in his
review on Slumdog for the British daily Independent, "On the one hand, we
get a man set alight by rioters, a child's horrific blinding, the discovery
of Latika in a brothel district. On the other hand, the film often seems
most at ease in a mode of larky comedy: notably, in a brisk sequence of
Jamal conning tourists at the Taj Mahal [hotel]."
A big difference between City of Joy and Slumdog could be in the latter's
integrating the diverse, contrasting elements of India, such as India's
version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire having a slum-dweller as winner. Or
contrasts such as Mumbai with Dharavi, the slum where the film was shot and
the main protagonists live, a megapolis with millions of homeless in the
streets and the city where industrialist Mukesh Ambani's is constructing a
27-storey residence, a 21st century Tower of Babel called "Antilla," costing
over $2 billion.
Or in Mumbai being the underworld capital of India, the dark world filled
with the goons of gangster Javed (Mahesh Manjrekar) that Jamal and Latika
have to escape the financial capital and home to the largest number of
charitable institutions in India.
Mumbai's verdict on Slumdog Millionaire will come following the scheduled
January 23 release of the film, which already achieved an impressive success
in the US where it leapt into the North American Top 10 with an 11% increase
in the first weekend of 2009 sales.
Running in 612 theatres in the US, besides 324 screens in Britain, Slumdog
Millionaire has grossed $28.78 million in the US as of January 6, the 54th
day of its release, according to Reuters movie revenue figures.
Like New York-based Indian-born director Mira Nair did after Salaam Bombay
in 1988 with her Salaam Baalak Trust to help the Mumbai street children on
whom her movie was based, director Boyle has established a trust fund with
Slumdog Millionaire income to help the Mumbai slum children.
The film featured real slum children because, as Loveleen Tandon, India
co-director, told the local media, "We did not want to cast middle-class
children from English medium schools because they could not have matched the
raw energy of the slum children."
Real life poverty-stricken Mumbai children like Rabina (playing the young
orphan slum girl Latika) and Azharauddin Ismail (Salim, brother of the hero
Jamal) cast in Boyle's film will have access to the funds when they finish
their schooling for which he has arranged. Danny Boyle, who said he hates
sentiment, told a music website, "They're learning English, and they sent me
birthday cards. I started weeping when I opened them
http://www.dayafterindia.com/feb109/silver_screen.html
--
regards,
Vithur
