No one following the meteoric rise of Slumdog Millionaire over the past few months, watching as it morphed from independent underdog (or should that be slumdog?) to multi-award-winning phenomenon, would have been very surprised when it cleaned up at the Oscars.
From the time of its Toronto premiere last September, when it won the audience award at the city’s film festival, Slumdog was destined for greatness. Only a few of the reasons for this have anything to do with the film’s quality. The picture was brilliantly timed, its release coinciding not only with increasing Western interest in the subcontinent’s growing stature but also, more importantly, with an economic downturn.
Traditionally, the movies have been a place we can go to escape reality, the place to cure what ails us, and indeed there could be no better antidote to stock market collapse and its attendant woes than a film about a lovable slum-dweller growing up to win millions on a television game show.
Part of what made the prospect of Slumdog‘s Oscar success so appealing to so many voters was that such a scenario would so closely mirror the film’s own narrative. Like Jamal Malik, the slumdog of the title, whose journeys take him from the squalid slums of Mumbai to the top prize on the local Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, so too would this little independent feature, which nearly failed to find a distributor, go up against, and beat, the biggest studios in the world. An Oscars success, many felt, would give this fairytale film its fairytale ending.
That success was practically a given. Much more unexpected, at least in my opinion, was the bizarre and seemingly universal perception that the film was a victory for India. While Indian commentators strenuously debated whether the film was exploitative poverty porn, Western commentators, especially in this country, took it for granted that it was a window on to the real India, an expression of that country’s dynamism and vibrancy.
There are at least two problems with this. For one thing, it assumes Indians should be happy with the way their country comes across in the film, overlooking the way its colour and movement mask an essentially negative portrayal of India’s institutions and economic successes. The second is the manner in which it assumes Slumdog Millionaire is an Indian film, overlooking its transnational pedigree—budgetary and aesthetic—and suggesting there is an idea of Indian-ness that can be captured somehow by the country’s national cinema.
Slumdog Millionaire, it is fair to say, is a well-made film, as cinematically dynamic as anything to which Boyle has previously put his name. It is a film that feels a lot like the filmmaker’s earliest, most exuberant efforts: A Life Less Ordinary with a subcontinental face; Trainspotting with a British-Indian Ewan McGregor. But for all its charms—the Dickensian melodrama of its narrative, its freewheeling camerawork, frenetic editing, and oh-so-attractive cast—it is essentially exploitative, capitalising on the West’s interest in India by confirming Western preconceptions about it. Having never visited the Mumbai slums, or indeed slums of any description, it is hardly my place to accuse Boyle of aestheticising poverty. As Dennis Lim wisely noted in the online magazine Salon, such charges are loaded and raise prickly questions about what poverty “should” look like. I don’t for a moment doubt the purity of the filmmaker’s intentions or his technical prowess.
But to quote Lim again, Boyle is an “indiscriminate sensualist”, which is really just another way of saying he’s an unthinking one. He serves up an entirely exoticised India, all whip pans and bleeding colours, and tries to pass it off as the genuine article. (“You wanted to see the real India?” Jamal shouts at two American tourists after their car has been stripped and as he is being beaten by police. “Here it is!”)
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Although it is true that the film raises issues not traditionally dealt with by Bollywood filmmakers, its fairytale narrative—which suggests such horrors can be overcome through television game shows and with a sizeable amount of luck—effectively cancels them out. The existence of the slums is never questioned. Yet a real slum-dweller, it is fair to say, would likely never have got on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?—itself a kind of wish-fulfilment fairytale—in the first place.
All this speaks to a larger and more pressing misconception that Slumdog Millionaire is somehow an inherently Indian film, an idea that goes to the heart of issues surrounding so-called national cinemas in an increasingly globalised cinematic landscape.
Shot entirely in India by a British director, with a largely Indian cast and crew, Slumdog Millionaire was funded with British and American money and adapted by a British screenwriter from an Indian author’s novel. Its British-Indian lead had to feign his Indian accent and never quite succeeded in doing so. Like so many pictures nowadays—especially those that find their way into film festivals—Slumdog is a completely transnational work.
It’s not the only one. Film finance flows more or less freely across borders. Film festivals the world over are establishing important funds geared towards film production in developing countries. Channels of aesthetic influence, as well as those of investment capital, are also becoming increasingly bi-directional or multi-directional. Contemporary cinema is a cinema without borders. If Western financing makes African, Asian and indigenous films possible, then filmmakers such as Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien and Senegal’s Ousmane Sembene, whose films are increasingly funded from outside their home countries, respond in kind by creating images that influence Western sensibilities.
The suggestion that Slumdog is an Indian film must therefore be based on something else, some sense that it succeeds in depicting a certain idea of Indian-ness. This idea, one can only assume, is that India is a country in which institutions such as the police and media are corrupt, economic success is to some extent invalid because it’s predicated on crime, and the slums, for all the horror and suffering they contain, are exciting to live in and beautiful to look at. It’s snake-charmers and magic carpet rides all over again.
When one calls Slumdog Millionaire an Indian film, one is revealing one’s own ideas about India and, instead of interrogating them as such, pretending they are truths. This should hardly come as a surprise in Australia, where for far too long the widely held position has been that national cinema should speak of the national character. Cinema here, it has been suggested, should help to forge the national identity, pundits and policymakers alike ascribing to the moving image an almost propagandistic purpose. The equally problematic flip side to this position is the situation described above, in which cinema becomes, not a way of challenging one’s perceptions, but of having them confirmed.
Inquirer, 4 April 2009
