The Case for Slumming It

For the first time in quite a while, I went to a fairly popular (as in well-attended) movie. Of course, it helped that it was at the glorious Embassy cinema, that the film is a recent release, and also that the hype for the film has been extraordinary. But, in the end, the reason for Slumdog Millionaire’s popularity proved to be that it is a really good film.

Slumdog Millionaire is a love story set against the backdrop of contemporary India, where extreme poverty and crime lords clash with incredible cultural beauty and multinational corporations. This is not the sanitised Bollywood of Bride and Prejudice, nor the wrist-slitting grit and melancholy of most of the recent prize-winning Indian novels, but a combination of the two. India is shown as a land of extremes, and the lead characters’ lives cover all (or at least, a lot) of them.

While the location may be quite exotic to Western eyes, the underlying story is nothing new. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy meets girl again, boy kind of loses her again, boy goes on Who Wants to be a Millionaire India. Some of the twists and turns are telegraphed a mile away, but how those twists and turns are incorporated into the story, and always linked back to the WWTBAM questions, is brilliantly told.

All the actors are superb (though the WWTBAM host gave me the wiggins), even if some of the more clichéd scenes let them down. For me, the most annoying was the oft-repeated “spotting across a crowded train station” device, even though this is India and there are about 50 platforms between the players, not to mention the several hundred thousand people who constantly mill about the place as well – whereas I have a hard enough time spotting people at the relatively tiny Wellington terminus.

Once the at times amusing, at times harrowing, and always entertaining film is over (and for no particular reason that I can see), the final credits roll over a Bollywood dance scene performed by the cast. Perhaps this was a treat for the actors, to have them participate in something so light and frothy after their more serious scenes of violence and heartache. For me, it felt a bit odd ending on such a frivolous note, but it also seemed to cleanse the cinematic palate of any bitter aftertaste from the film, so all that was left at the forefront of the tongue was a lovely sensation of the amazing images and colours of India.

Verdict: Plot-wise, not really a revelation, but Slumdog Millionaire told a fairly simple story very well. An Extremely Hot on a scale of Indian spiciness.