Slumdog Millionaire may have been thrown bouquets by western critics and audiences, but brickbats are flying in its direction in India.
Although the film was a big winner at Sunday’s Golden Globes and is seen as a frontrunner for the Oscars, Amitabh Bachchan, Bollywood’s top actor and perhaps one of the most famous faces in the world, has voiced bitter comments about the movie’s portrayal of India.
Writing on his blog, Bachchan said that “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.”
Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan rubbishes Slumdog Millionaire | Film | guardian.co.uk
There has been some debate about the “Indian-ness” of the movie. Slumdog Millionaire was directed by the British film-maker Danny Boyle, best known for the noir comedy of Trainspotting. The film is based on a novel, Q&A, by the Indian writer and diplomat Vikas Swarup, and adapted by Simon Beaufoy, the British screenwriter of The Full Monty.
Bachchan added that an Indian director making a western-style film might not meet with the attention lavished on Slumdog Millionaire: “It’s just that the SM idea, authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a westerner, gets creative globe recognition. The other would perhaps not.”
Bachchan himself features in the movie, by proxy: the young protanogist is obsessed with the actor and in a hilarious early scene stops at nothing to get the autograph of his idol, played by Feroz Abbas Khan.
Slumdog’s opening sequences are largely in Hindi but the film has little in common with conventional Indian cinema, where films are more about escapism than realism. This has also riled the Big B, as Bachchan is universally known in Bollywood, who seems particularly irked by the critical praise that Indian arthouse cinema has attracted over the decades.
“The commercial escapist world of Indian cinema had vociferously battled for years, on the attention paid and the adulation given to the legendary Satyajit Ray at all the prestigious film festivals of the west, and not a word of appreciation for the entertaining mass oriented box-office blockbusters that were being churned out from Mumbai. The argument: Ray portrayed reality; the other, escapism, fantasy and incredulous posturing. Unimpressive for Cannes and Berlin and Venice.”
There may be another reason for Bachchan’s words: he was the original host of the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, a show that resurrected his career. However, rival Bollywood star Anil Kapoor steals his thunder with a remarkable performance as the creepy host of the game show in Slumdog.
But many fans have rushed to the defence of Boyle’s movie. “Slumdog doesn’t show a complete picture of India or Indians, but few movies show a complete picture of any place or people, particularly a sprawling, expressive, multicultural city like Mumbai. You see a mere slice. Slumdog shows poverty, and it shows wealth, and it shows someone who survives one and is unconcerned with the other. What he is concerned with is LOVE. And that is so Indian,” wrote svhayter on Bachchan’s blog.
I heard on NPR that initially the director was looking for a young bollywood face to play the lead but no one seemed interested, thinking it wasnt ‘blockbuster’ material.
