So much to process and ponder, watching Danny Boyle's cinematically brilliant yet ethically convoluted Slumdog Millionaire. Peter Bradshaw's review in the Guardian contained one acute observation that stayed with me as I took my seat: this story about a young Mumbai slum-dweller who wins the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire was co-produced with the company (Celador) that owns the game-show format.
Could any orchestrator of mass passivity before spectacles of fortune and meaningless competition luck out more than this? That their shabby tv format becomes the hook for an amazingly rich immersion in the 21st century's most interesting megacity? Imagine Countdown as the premise for Stanley Kubrick musing on science and language. Or the X-Factor as the premise of a Don DeLillo short story on prole dreams and media machination.
Does a dumb big format like this deserve such aesthetic lustre? As this brand-perfect version of Who Wants... threaded through the movie, I thought of Paul Thomas Anderson's bleached-out subversion of the tv game show in Magnolia, where a general-knowledge format becomes a crucible for pathology and perversion. Inventing his format from scratch at least allowed Anderson to tease and jab at the genre's cheesy desperation. (I'm just as uncomfortable about Shane Meadows' Somers Town - where two London urchins jump a Eurostar train to Paris - being funded by... Eurostar. What narrative decisions were a priori ruled out because of that investment?)
Boyle says his favourite scene in the movie is where an old woman bangs on the window of the cab of the young Millionaire contestant, Jamal Malik, as he drives to the studio. "The audience and Jamal think that she's gonna beg for money [because she recognises him from the show] but she says, 'Good luck. We love you, Jamal'. I love that scene because she was just a lady off the street that we asked to do that part... and it sums up Bombay for me - it's not a place where you can predict, in any way shape or form what's going to happen, it's always surprising".
Some surprise: a street-woman in Mumbai is just as transfixed by the power of a cash-driven tv spectacle as her contemporary in Manchester, Montana or Montevideo. And you gave her the line anyway, Danny...
But where do you draw the line between a Western director being visually ravished by the Dickensian energy of a world city - and producing tourist porn of the most hard-core variety? Boyle exults in a scene depicting how laundry gets dried in India: the clothes are secured with stones in the spaces between train-tracks, where the warm air thrown up by the trains dries them in five minutes, with the laundry-collectors risking death most of the day. It's a shiveringly beautiful shot (and no doubt the phenomenon will get its own pull-out box in the next Tyler Brule supplement on 'visiting Mumbai'.)
But how can we enjoy this compacted, cheek-by-jowl splendour, when the stats tell you (from Mike Davis's Planet of Slums) that the rich own 90% of Mumbai's land, while the rest of the population is stuffed into the remaining 10%? Or (this from UN-Habitat) that Mumbai is the world's biggest slum, with 12 million squatters living under that gorgeous palimpsest of tin roofs?
For me, a movie like City of God (or even more brilliantly, Tsotsi) gets the balance right between the need to grip a general audience with drama and visuals, and the responsibility to convey the raw structural misery that enables such thrilling narratives. And with opening scenes of electrical torture of the young hero, and later scenes of child mutilation, pre-teen killers and gangster excess, the director of Trainspotting can hardly be accused of sentimentalising the city.
But the deepest challenge of Slumdog Millionaire is its exploration of the concept of 'destiny' in the consciousness of Mumbai dwellers.
The movie begins with a witty use of a option box at the beginning of the movie, where four answers to the question "How did Jamal win 20 million rupees on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" are presented: "money", "luck", "smarts", "it is written" - the last one glowing as the correct answer. The romantic use of the notion in the movie is that Jamal feels he is destined to be with his fellow orphan, Latika, a girl who spins through a parallel narrative of exploitation. This is not so non-Western: we still have the love ideal at the end of every other Hollywood movie, even the frat-boy comedies.
But the super-smart Boyle is also aware that he's juggling between "Western" and "Eastern" concepts of destiny. The Eastern version, in Boyle's sixties-era view (see video clip below) gives Mumbai-ers a spiritual cushion against the chaos, "a way of coping with the extraordinary weight of placement in this community...They accept what maybe we would regard as a terrible condition of life - they accept that is their destiny". Boyle uses Jamal as the vehicle for the Western notion - that his memories, his life experience, can help him choose his destiny, by using them to get all the answers right on the game-show.
Jamal's life-course through the movie, compared to his gun-toting gangster brother, Salim, chimes with the optimistic vision of current Indian development. He moves from street-hustling the tourists, to working in a restaurant, to being a tea-boy in a call-centre, where he discovers the media connection that will get him onto the game show. That the clean-living, emotionally-devoted, intrinsically truth-telling, Western-oriented Jamal is victorious - while his brother Salim sacrifices himself in the very pits of gangster nihilism to save Jamal, shooting a Mumbai kingpin from his bathtub, covered in rupees - is a great confirmation of "India Shining", as the government marketing campaign put it. Jamal has "written" his own destiny - and the film clearly hopes that this kind of existential self-empowerment will be the eventual byproduct of call-centres, game-shows, well-stocked shopping malls, the "soft powers" of Western cultural modernity.
Yet as the property-magnate gangsters and the model young existentialists conduct their struggles, amidst Boyle's roiling sea of social pre-destination, does that mean there is no civic, or reformist Mumbai? No teachers struggling to teach, no canvassers of the democratic potential of the slums, no officials trying to enact municipal policy? You know, boring can-do and do-good-ers? Is Mumbai always destined to be a Maximum City?
In scrabbling for context, I found a review in the New York Review of Books of the acclaimed Sukhai Mehta's Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by the equally acclaimed Indian critic Pankaj Mishra (Boyle has explicitly cited Maximum City as an influence on Slumdog Millionaire). Mishra generally approves of the book, but notes that the "documentary naturalism that [Mehta] often lapses into ends up obscuring the causes of violence, and turns it into a remote and garish spectacle, likely to be savored by its metropolitan audience for its weird and grotesque aspects." My constant anxiety for Slumdog, exactly.
But Mishra also quotes Mehta's speculation that there may come in Mumbai a "transition similar to what American cities went through at the end of the twentieth century, when the political machines of the Democratic party dominated, bringing new immigrants jobs and political power while breaking a few heads along the way... Eventually, as in the American cities, there will be reform movements, reform candidates, to clean out the muck...in Bombay, this has not yet happened."
Will it happen? Mishra makes the point that the great American cities tamed their urban corruption as the American empire prospered in the world - and maybe the nascent superpowers of India and China, "both nuclear-armed and with fiercely nationalistic middle classes", will manage the same trick with Mumbai (or Shanghai).
Yet where are these competent and development-oriented classes in Slumdog Millionaire? Amidst the corrupt cops and the vicious gameshow hosts and the institutionally-secure gangsters, nowhere to be seen. They're maybe too boring to narrate for a Hollywood-funded movie - but we know those aesthetic limitations all too well.
Maybe the clean-cut, job-holding Jamal is heading towards that particular bourgeois destiny - though in the visions of both Mehta and Boyle, the obstacles to being a civic agent in Mumbai in this way are almost insuperable. "Bombay is the future of urban civilization on the planet", says Mehta on the first page of his book: "God help us." As Jamal and his girl dance the end of the movie away, in a meretricious Bollywood-esque sequence, you can easily see it as a welcome flight into triviality, away from the horrific realities (and absent forces for change) that Slumdog Millionaire has depicted.
Having said all that, it's a beautifully incomplete and excitingly arguable movie - which is about the best review that I could give any artform.
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