Slumdog Millionaire

Starring: Anil Kapoor, Irrfan Khan, Dev Patel, Freida Pinto
Director: Danny Boyle
Rating:*

Anil Kapoor stood up and cheered lustily into the camera when Danny Boyle won the Golden Golden Globe last weekend. I wish I could share his enthusiasm for Danny's phenomenal flight into frenzy. After all the accolades and awards Slumdog Millionaire (SM) proves to be a deafening blow to the year that saw Mumbai go numb with terror.

SM takes nasty below-the-belt potshots at the underbelly of the city, portraying Mumbai as the armpit among the metropolises.

Mira Nair once paid a warm endearing homage to the street children of Mumbai in Salaam Bombay.Long before, Satyajit Ray in Pather Panchali portrayed rural India as poor but never as a gutter of misery.

It's now Danny Boyle's turn to do a 'Slam' Mumbai. The coming-of-age tale about three orphaned chawl kids bears just a passing resemblance to Boyle's rightly-celebrated Trainspotting where the director trailed a bunch of misfits through the streets of Edinburgh.

Slumdog Millionaire is Trainspotting on steroids. It's a beefed -up look at the scummy side of Mumbai, bewildering in its obsession with discovering life in the chawls of Dharavi (curiously the protagonist Jamal is referred to as "the boy from Juhu") as being a facsimile of that drain-inspector's report which Mahatma Gandhi had discovered American journalist Katherine Mayo's account of India in Mother India to be.

Slumdog Millionaire is worse. It looks at Mumbai as a swarming slum of sleaze sex and crime with characters who seem to have jumped out of Rakesh Roshan's and Manmohan Desai's cinema bruising their deep-focussed emblematic quality while making this huge global leap from 'Bollywood' to 'Hollywood'.

After seeing Boyle's much talked-of film it's crystal clear why this murky and squalid portrait of Mumbai has the Americans preening in delight.

At one point after being thrashed mercilessly our hero Jamal tells American tourists, "You wanted to see real India? Here it is. ""Now we'll show you the real America," the American lady replies handing Jamal a 100-dollar bill.

This, without any apparent sense of irony.

This isn't the 'real' India. This is India as seen through the eyes of a Westerner who's selling desi squalor packaged as savvy slick entertainment.

There is a very thin line dividing slick from scum. Slumdog Millionaire doesn't stop to make those subtle distinctions. It moves at a frenetic pace creating a kind of sweaty energy that one sees in marathon runners in the last lap of their journey.

Boyle is constantly busy whipping up a hysterical banshee of sights and sounds in Mumbai denoting the embittered angry generation of the underprivileged class that grows up in the slums dreaming of the Good Life.

Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle shoots Mumbai with a gun rather than a camera. Every frame conveys the killer instinct. Every shot ricochets across eternity solidifying sounds and feelings that are otherwise intangible.

Yup, this is a film on a mission. It wants to exploit the Mumbai slums as a hotbed of tantalizing images conveying the splendour of squalidity.

And to think every prominent of the cast and crew went around proclaiming Slumdog Millionaire would do wonders for Mumbai's tourism industry!