Sweet & heart-breaking

Film review: Slumdog Millionaire

It took quite a while getting here but here finally is the chance to see it on the big screen. It is quite a film more so when you factor in a fact that watching every scene in Slumdog Millionaire made me green with envy. That is what it should do. Make every Filipino movie lover green with envy. Why didn’t anybody here think of doing something like this.

We are all familiar with the ingredients in the story. In fact, the local version of the game show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? had a long successful run with no less than the country’s greatest actor Christopher de Leon as host. Okay, the TV studio was not that technologically sophisticated, but it served very well.

We also have a surfeit of all the other elements around us. Hero is a slum kid who survives by his wits, think thief, impostor or whatever the situation demands. The girl he loves was sexually abused as a child and is now a gangster’s moll.

Around them are friends and relatives, his brother has killed a man, who are mostly afoul with the law. And they exist in grinding poverty amidst the bustling beauty of present-day India where people sleep on cardboard on the sidewalk.

It is out of these that writer Vikas Swarup wove the rags-to-riches tale of the novel Q & A. Then it is from this that director Danny Boyle and writer Simon Beaufoy created a film that inspires, exhilarates and explodes into a dazzling vision of what a beautiful world ours could be.

Jamal played by Dev Patel is the slum dog of the title. He gets into Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? and is on his way to the life-changing jackpot of 20 million rupees. But nobody believes it could be happening because Jamal is illiterate. With this in mind, the show’s host Anil Kapoor goads the police into torturing the boy to make him admit he had been cheating all along.

But Jamal is no cheat and as he explains the reasons why he has a lifeline to every question, his life also unfolds. An orphan whose mother was killed in a street riot, he is now looking for the two people who matter most to him, his older brother Salim played by Madhur Mittal, a hunted criminal and the girl he loves, the former child prostitute Latika, played by the gorgeous Freida Pinto. It is this search that provides him with the right final answers.

The story is sweet and heartbreaking, although told with too much of a coincidence at times. But no matter, Boyle and Beaufoy imbued the film with so much love and hope one cannot help but be affected. True, there are moments so unbearable that you cannot help but look away and think, there but for the grace of God go I. But when you get down to it, this whole thing is actually brilliant filmmaking.

This ability to turn the mundane into affecting is what differentiates the craftsman from the artist. Both Beaufoy of The Full Monty and Boyle who did Trainspotting have shown this capability before. Now with material so rich in color and texture, they once more, got the chance to do something wondrous.

Anthony Dod Mantle’s unrelenting camera showed the sights of India and its people, both the warts and the jewels. A.R. Rahman’s music, a chugging mix of ethnic, techno and hip-hop followed along. And Chris Dickens cut and spliced the images to form the whole. The effect is magical one moment, gut-wrenching the next and like the TV game show, terribly suspenseful.

Now in case you are among the few who have not heard, those guys plus Boyle and Beaufoy all won the Academy Award for their work on Slumdog Millionaire. The movie bagged Best Picture, too. The prizes are richly deserved yet all I could think of while watching them bag trophy after trophy was, aaaagh, we could have done this, too. It remains a dream but an Oscar for a Filipino film would be very nice.