As you may know, being a Bernese Mountain Dog, I don’t get to watch too many movies. The last one I did, “Beverley HillsChihuahua” was such a chick-flick, a complete letdown for someone of my stature, know what I mean? So, when “Slum Dog Millionaire” won all those Oscars, I said wow (well, actually I said “bow-wow” but my owner edited it so it wouldn’t sound so cheesy—talking of which I do love cheese-cake, but that’s for another day, another blog!) maybe I should check it out.
To say I was impressed would be an understatement (and I don’t impress easy, so). It was truly a love story at par with another movie from another time: “Titanic” –except that while that one’s setting was the grand opulence of the majestic ship that could never sink (and so it did!), and a love that never was consummated (or was it? hmmm…), this one was set in the squalor, but nevertheless great vibrancy, of the Mumbai slums. To take a dozen or so, more or less disjointed stories, from a book that at first glance really does not lend itself to a movie, and with an abundant use of artistic license, to dexterously change and concatenate them all into a powerful and, more importantly, fluid and meaningful screenplay, was really the superb foundation upon which the director has then built this tome of love, akin to the sheer breathtaking majesty of the Taj Mahal rising simmering out of the marshy swamps on the banks of the Yamuna. The screenwriter’s sharp eye has seen this diamond in the rough (the novel by Swarup), and has, with amazing grace, extracted and expanded its essence and created the screenplay for this poignant moving picture far more effectively than any literal translation of that novel could ever have achieved! The kid’s moral compass –and his brother’s lack thereof, but abundance of street smarts and survival skills!--brought him thus far…he wasn’t doing it for revenge or money…it was for love. So mundane, yet so profound!
Which leads me to ask: why did it have to take a couple of non-Indians to make this so quintessentially Indian movie? Don’t we as Indians see the beauty that is all around us, or do we only see and smell the feces—but fail to perceive what’s within? Is beauty really skin-deep to us? In my opinion, it is but a paradox of life, that to truly observe it and “paint it” (be it with a brush, a pen or the lens of a camera), one must be able to “step out” from everything that define us. In other words, to take a dispassionate view, one must be able to completely detach oneself from ones surroundings and beliefs and yet be able to use the innate talents we posses to tell the story we wish to tell. And I don’t mean detachment in just a superficial physical sense, but also to some extent, mentally and spiritually as well. Did the duo of Beaufoy and Boyle have this?—well, not necessarily. It’s just that their psyche did not come burdened with the excess baggage of “Indianess” that Indians seem to carry around with them (which would make them comment-- with disdain, might I say-- on a slum kid jumping into a shit-pool, without ever walking in his shoes). There are some great Indian screenwriters and directors, but from the work they keep churning out year after year, it would seem they are not able to overcome this final hurdle to true cinematographic greatness!
