So there's this film. I don't know if you've heard of it...

Walking out of Slumdog Millionaire, I couldn't help but feel the most agonizing burden of ambivalence. The person who once had a passionate argument with a fellow jobless individual about whether green Froot Loops are more tantalizing than yellow ones (I picked green) had mixed feelings about a film that the whole world had emphatically chosen as its film of the year. There had to be something wrong with me, I concluded. I don't know what I can add to the din that already surrounds this film. Everyone seems to have very strong feelings about it. And, honestly, I don't. Don't get me wrong - it wasn't that I didn't enjoy the film or that my vision of it was clouded by everything that I have read/heard about it. The film had all the makings to become the 2 greatest hours of my life - India, hope, guns-n-gangStars, Irrfan Khan, Mahesh Manjrekar (!), unrelenting love and a heavy share of chatpatta Boombai masala. Everything....but, it just didn't seem mine.

Danny Boyle's Trainspotting is one of my favourite films of all time. It is a fast-paced, racy trip (hah! pun intended) through the manic lives of a group of heroin addicts in Edinburgh. Often critiqued for glamorizing the horror of heroin abuse, it is an interestingly flashy portrayal of pain. And, while Slumdog hasn't achieved quite the same rapturous intensity, there are moments in it that feel oh-so-Danny-Boyle familiar. My favourite portion of the film is this one. It is everything I had imagined Slumdog Millionaire would be.


AR Rahman beats, M.I.A.'s nasal growl, stunningly dire visuals, running boys - their footfalls so firm on the Dharavi streets your heart pumps, la tendresse in the grime. For me, sadly, there wasn't enough of this in the film. After the first 30 minutes of the film, I felt like it degenerated into a string of plot-driven events and circumstances.

That's not to say that I wasn't curled up like a nervous hedgehog in my cinema seat, eyes as wide as tea saucers, madly whispering **spoiler alert** "Jack Hobbs" when Jamal is faced with the first-class hundreds question. And that's not to say that I wasn't bouncing up and down in my seat when Salim's phone rings-and-rings-and-rings during the last question ["Come on Latika! Pick up the goddamn phone man!!"]. A fantasy plot meets the venomous reality bug. It's not like it hasn't been done before, and it certainly has been done by Danny Boyle before. It just didn't work for me in this movie.

But enough about me! Let's talk about Slumdog.

You know what was really great about the film? How many full-blown masaledar bindaas Bollywood cinema techniques it embraced. The relationship between two chalk-and-cheese brothers - one who lives for rising out of the grime, by any means necessary -- one who values naught but family, love, companionship (Deewaar, anyone?). The shots of Latika's foray into the musty redlight district are so similar to Hindi cinema shots of courtesan/bar girl scenes that I had to bow down to cinematographer Anthony Mantle's keen sense of cinematic vision (also, anyone else notice how the familiar strains of "Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai" were AR Rahman-ised in "Ringa Ringa"?). And, really, the Jamal-Latika love-defies-all-odds story is child's play to any Bombay film industry wallah. Also, has Danny Boyle pulled a Yash Chopra with his shooting of Jai Ho in VT Station? Let's wait and watch if we have Hollywood producers lining up outside Laloo Prasad Yadav's office to try and grab spots to shoot their love songs in various Indian railway stations. (I'm only half-joking by the way)

It's interesting watching Danny Boyle stray away from his indie noir-comedy and trying his hand at making a commercially viable, universally appealing film. But perhaps I've watched far too many Hindi films and, therefore, Slumdog seemed like a poor man's attempt at classic Bollywood. The melodrama quotient was altogether too subtle in Slumdog. Perhaps the songs should have lingered longer. The characters been more spicy. The dialogue richer. The lead actor (Ila will kill me for this) better. Dev Patel made for a rotten Bombay slumdog, I must say (although, A+ for effort, mate). The accent was atrocious, the wide-eyed marvelling at the city rang false and, in general, he was unconvincing. And the argument that Loveleen Tandon/Danny Boyle couldn't find a single actor in India to play the role -well, that's just a plain lie, isn't it? I'm not saying you need to cast Shah Rukh Khan or Hrithik Roshan in the role. But, why didn't you just pick up an (older) kid from the slums, like you did with Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail and Rubina Ali if you were gunning for 'authenticity'? And hey, I thought all the supporting actors in the film (from Irrfan to Saurabh Shukla to Madhur Mittal) did an excellent job in their roles...guess what, they're all Indian. So, really, Dev Patel was a deliberate choice.

Also, I wish people would stop talking about the film like it's a work of activist cinema. No, it's really not. It's a film in which two young boys find ways out of a glamourized slum using a keen sense of enterprise and a whole lotta luck. It's happy. Where the good guys win, and the bad guys...well, we lose them, somewhere between becoming overnight millionaires and mushy "kiss me" love reunions. It's not a film about Poverty - it's a film about Jamal Malik. But also, why are some people acting as if this is the first film in which an Indian slum has been portrayed? Clearly people have NOT been watching enough cinema coming out of the country if they think this film has done what no Indian film has done before. You don't even have to stray too far from commercial Hindi cinema to find dark, dreary images of the slum life - Ram Gopal Varma and Madhur Bhandarkar have instant poverty all ready for your DVD player. But also, if you're living in India or have lived in India, and you need a flashy film to tell you that slums and inhuman destitution exist in our country...really, Yash Raj Films and song-and-dance sequences are not the problem at all.

OK, this is beginning to sound like a rant post. And it shouldn't be that! I liked the film. I promise. Enough to see it twice. Enough to cry like a baby during both viewings and every time I've watched the trailer. It's a beautiful film...but I can't help but feel that too much about it was just too deliberate. The tears and the trauma, the smiles and the soaring spirits, the loss and the love...it all just felt too practiced and packaged. The reeling, rolling abandon of the opening clip is quickly lost in gasping-for-breath breakneck storytelling and, somewhere, the universal appeal of the film is lost and Jamal's individual story becomes the focus of the narrative. It's a film that is a visual marvel...but an intellectually/emotionally unchallenging one.

Having said all of that, though, I will be cheering my tush off for Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle and AR RAHMAN at the Oscars. Because ultimately, they brought together the Ska/Dancehall grit of M.I.A. and the exuberance of Jai Ho. Because, I will forever be indebted to them for the scene (from which this agonizingly beautiful photo is taken) in which Jamal (played by the altogether too perfect Ayush Mahesh Khedekar) braves sabotage and defecation to secure an autograph from Amitabh ji. And, for creating a motion picture in which we all realise that, somewhere deep down in all of us, is a scabby little slumdog, fighting his way through a not-so-great world by living off of that magical fairy dust that always makes things better...love.