Honestly, I’m perplexed by the range of reactions that Slumdog has elicited. I liked the movie, had a great time while I was watching it, adored the sound track and cinematography and thought the plot and acting were clichéd. But a week later, I would have forgotten the film if not for all the other hoopla surrounding it.
The core of the controversy seems to be whether the film is exploitative. Who gets exploited (slumdwellers, old India, new India) changes depending on who is levelling the accusation, but each time the claim is that the movie is somehow poverty pr0n.
The main broadside against the film was lobbed by Amitabh who said:
“if SM projects India as [a] third-world, dirty, underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations.” [link]
He later backpedaled, saying that the words were not his own, and that he had put them up merely to start a debate.
Similar criticism came from former ambassador (and Sree‘s dad) T P Sreenivasan, who saw the movie as undermining new India:
Having read the novel and seen the film, I cannot say that it has done more good than harm to India. This is not a matter of my wanting to shove the reality under the carpet… the film is exploitation of the novel, of Dharavi, of poverty, of Rahman, of India itself to titillate foreign audiences. It is the exploitation of the new curiosity about India’s success.Torture is internationally banned and the director of the film knew that India had not joined the global consensus against torture….The torture scenes do not add much to the story, but denigrates India even more than the slums do… As though the depiction of squalor, crime and cruelty is not enough, the film challenges India’s success. [link]
And an anonymous friend of mine summed up his discomfort with the film by saying:
Anything having to do with the third world that masses of white people go into paroxysms over is guilty until proven innocent…
On the other side are writers like Nirpal Dhaliwal in London, who parry Big B’s thrusts arguing that his discomfort with the movie is revealing:
Poor Indians, like those in Slumdog, do not constitute India’s “murky underbelly” as Bachchan moronically describes them. They, in fact, are the nation. Over 80% of Indians live on less than $2.50 (£1.70) a day; 40% on less than $1.25. A third of the world’s poorest people are Indian, as are 40% of all malnourished children. In Mumbai alone, 2.6 million children live on the street or in slums, and 400,000 work in prostitution. But these people are absent from mainstream Bollywood cinema. [link]
David Bordwell, whose extensive review is one of the best I’ve seen and who is actually fairly critical of the movie, responds to Bachchan by pointing out that the first world has also had to deal with depictions of its own poverty in film (and therefore that this is not a First vs. Third World issue):
Indian criticisms of the image of poverty in Slumdog remind me of reactions to Italian Neorealism from authorities concerned about Italy’s image abroad. The government undersecretary Giulio Andreotti claimed that films by Rossellini, De Sica, and others were “washing Italy’s dirty linen in public.”…Liberal American films of the Cold War period were sometimes castigated by members of Congress for playing into the hands of Soviet propagandists. It seems that there will always be people who consider films portraying social injustice to be too negative and failing to see the bright side of things, a side that can always be found if you look hard enough. [link]
It is bizarre to me that both detractors and supporters of the movie agree that the movie is realistic and disagree about whether this realism is shameful or productive. Sure, SDM was a “more realistic” portrayal of India than your average Bolly flick, but that’s like saying that it was a more realistic portrayal of India than Johnny Quest. To me, the film itself remained fantastical, escapist and Dickensian, more Oliver Twist than clever plot twist. I just can’t be bothered to get my chuddies in a knot over it. Show me a realistic portrayal of India, and then we’ll rumble.
Related: Sajaforum’s roundup, everything on Slumdog on UB, and of course, everything we’ve blogged on the topic
“(son of a prostitute is the commonly used bad word in Tamil)”
“Boli Magane!”…ha!
“(son of a prostitute is the commonly used bad word in Tamil)”
“Sule Magane!”
I love cursing in south indian languages.
dipanajan, thanks for that nice bit of sleuthing (@ 146).
149 · Bobby said
Actually, the story goes that it was Tandon, the co-director who first convinced him to do the early sections in Hindi. She handled casting, and this allowed her to cast the two kids who were from Dharavi, who, in my opinion, were the heart of the movie.
99 · Sameer said
To me, this is the crux of the problem. SDG does argue that India has not done enough to help its poor, and is to blame for the situation of the protagonist who lives in a slum. But this point is made in an unspoken contrast to America, where the film takes as a premise that there are no poor people such as Jamal about which to tell a story. One of the implicit arguments in SDG is that India is worse off than just about everywhere else, and it encourages Americans (and others) to sit back, feeling self-satisfied about the state of our country, even though the dominant sentiment in America exactly mirrors that of India: ignore the poor, pretend the destitute don’t exist. If Danny Boyle wanted to film a story about the fortunes of a poor person, there are plenty to choose from that come from America, and, my goodness, Great Britain. But he chose to tell a story about an Indian, and it makes it seem as though India is the last place in the world someone can find a story like this.
155 · Gina said
how’d you figure this? did you see this in the director’s liner notes? did trainspotting imply that there are no druggies in ireland?
Gina – the scriptwriter is best known for his work on the Full Monty, which was a movie about how unemployed english steelworkers resort to stripping to make ends meet. The director is best known for Trainspotting, a film about Scottish drug addicts. These are hardly people who have shied away from the underbelly of life in the UK.
in addition to what Ennis said, India has not done enough for its poor. The implication that the movie is highlighting problems that don’t exist in real life is dishonest.
Ennis, your point is taken, and perhaps what I should have said is that if the Academy wanted to highlight a narrative about poor people they didn’t necessarily have to choose the film about India. There was a lot of talk about the narrative the Academy wanted to advance this year, and that narrative seems to be, “Oh, those poor brown folks!”
I am wary of Danny Boyle, though, for a multitude of reasons, including an interview he gave in which he exhibited absolutely zero sense of there being a problem with a British director making a film about India’s poor. I don’t think British directors are precluded from making films about India, but I think they should be aware of and give sincere thought to the issues surrounding such a venture, and Boyle seemed uninterested in any such notions until the controversy broke.
You alls is slum dogs. Peace out.
159 · Gina said
I really dont get these kind of sentiments.
Really dont.
Non westerners want recognition in the west. When the west doesnt notice, maybe they’re too good for us. When they do, they’re appropriating/exotifying/exploiting us.
Eastern/etc pop culture has taken so much from western pop. When the west is influenced by the non-west, let the “they’re appropriating/exotifying/exploiting us” begin.
When Lost in Translation came out, so many insecure Asian writers couldnt stop crying of how the Scarlett didnt have some kind of Zen enlightening awakening and Bill Murray made fun of some Japanese people (like he makes of like, everyone in every single movie he’s ever made).
When will we get over this minority complex?
138 · shilpa said
But to consider the many layers of influences would make the criticism more complex and challenging. If its acknowledged that Boyle and co wasnt just straight ripping off and appopriating Bollywood and those poor brown people, it wouldnt make the criticis feel as intellectual.
Sure it may have seemed insightful or witty to label MIA the “favela funk thief” but if an actual second or 2 was taken to think about something like that, the critic would have realized favela funk was a thief in itself.
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Movie Slumdogs
Once again I am struck by this rising to the surface of a shadowy battle; the clash of exports from the two great film-producing countries of the world, mediated by the old imperial master, Britain. There are many good movies on Mumbai, classic like Anand or Kaagaz Ke Phool or Maqbool, but also the more urban-modern: Bombay, Company, Satya. All edgy in different ways, visually arresting, tugging at your emotions, musically vivid. And then, I recently saw Slumdog Millionaire and have watched its Dickensian appeal to the Western media, rising up in waves about the feel-good story of the underdog, the conceits, the pulsating music and truthful view of Mumbai like the Indians would never tell it, and the raw cinematography. The interviews with Dev Patel (where are you from really? London, really? You have never been to India??) and Freida Pinto (are you from India? Really? Sure you are not from Portugal?) and the excitement over Bollywood dancing over the ending credits. Slumdog Millionaire? A decent Bollywood movie on a $13MM budget. Good production values. But great? Come on! Wake up. Watch a few really good Mumbai movies…like the other ones I mention above. And I am just talking about movies out of Mumbai. Don’t get me started on Adoor and Ritwik and the other great movie makers that have suffered the fate of all subalterns. Danny Boyle vs. Guru Dutt vs. Mani Ratnam. Such sadness underlies one of the great loves of my life, and yet so much richness.