Outside Context

Cesca and I sat in the heat of the Mum­bai movie theatre around the corner from the Vic­toria Sta­tion – that defin­ing land­mark at the centre of the city – and waited for the film to start.  All around us were packed in hun­dreds of the Mum­bai crowd.  I scanned their faces.  The film was in Eng­lish with no sub­titles, other than those found in the inter­na­tional edi­tion, so most of the audi­ence were those more edu­cated types who under­stand Eng­lish very well.  None-the-less, I was sure that all over the city a large vari­ety of people packed in to cinemas and movie houses to see this film and its greatest star.

The city of Mum­bai itself.

We had wandered around this blend of rich tex­tures and smells, that passes for a mod­ern enlightened city, for two days now and I still found it hard to get a handle on.  Mil­lions live here of all fin­an­cial levels, seem­ingly divided by suc­cess and yet man­aging to live together.  To some this is a dan­ger­ous cock­tail that after a few days has you tear­ing your hair out, but I’m from another city alike this one; Lon­don; and I know how to stop a city from get­ting to you.

Or at least I thought I did.

The film fea­tures scenes of the harshest look­ing kinds; shanty towns, rub­bish dumps, con­crete jungles, dis­gust­ing garbage and kids beg­ging on the streets.  It is a test­a­ment to the film’s qual­ity and real­ity that the young beg­gars all look exactly like the little fel­low that was yank­ing on my arm only a few hours earlier, ask­ing for a dollar.

Not since Chil­dren of God, the film that told the story of Rio, has a film so nailed the sense of a city.  For while Slum­dog Mil­lion­aire is a fic­tional story, it has a real smell of truth about it.  Make no bones, this is a movie that isn’t afraid to make your stom­ach turn and your heart break.

The story is simple enough; a young man is doing very well on the Indian ver­sion of “Who wants to be a mil­lion­aire?”  The police how­ever know that he is a simple boy from the rough part of town; a slum­dog; and shouldn’t be able to answer such hard ques­tions cor­rectly.  They arrest him for cheat­ing and, after tor­tur­ing him mer­ci­lessly, take him through his ques­tions as he explains how his past enabled him to simply know the answers.

His past is relived by us in col­our­ful, hor­rible, smart, lov­ing, flash­backs that are full of loss, life, hate, pain, tears and the inev­it­ab­il­ity that a slum­dog is inher­ently a nobody.  The final ques­tion changes from “will he win the mil­lion?” to “will he win the love of the girl?”

Of course there is a girl involved.  I did say that the story was simple.  There is even a dance num­ber at the end, over the credits.

Slum­dog Mil­lion­aire showed me more of the soul of Mum­bai than I had gleaned in my two days vis­it­ing the city as a tour­ist. It showed me the under­belly; the neces­sity of crime to sur­vive in a place that can be so grim and yet, some­how, so beau­ti­ful.  In the end the story is per­fect for Mum­bai, the home of Bol­ly­wood, in that it is a romantic love story and thank­fully a really good one.

We both loved the film immensely, the act­ing is uni­formly great and the romance believ­able and so recom­mend it whole heartedly.  8.

Regards,

Basho

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