Don’t worry Tash, I did love it!
Yup, I’m just back from finally seeing Slumdog Millionaire with Oliver and Owen at the Picturehouse, Paper Planes still ringing in my ears. It’s the film that absolutely everybody has told me to go and see and I don’t have much to add to the many, many blogs I’ve read about it already, really. It’s a great film, wonderfully made, with a plot that you know is going to end on a fulfilling, heartwarming and somewhat sentimental note but – y’know – sometimes that’s not a bad thing. I can’t always do grim. It was also the perfect time for me to see this kind of film, at the end of a long essay-writing day where I’d handed it in about ten minutes before the deadline. At the point in the weekly cycle you suddenly get filled with a rush of satisfaction and contentment (the tiredness kicks in tomorrow) so it was lovely to relax and let the cinema wash over me. I am curious about how the film has gone down amongst the Indian public generally – is the depiction of the slums sensationalist, voyeuristic, unfair? I don’t know, and I’m not really in the mood for digging deep into the politics of it at the moment to be honest. It was good.
Having seen various pieces of history from the country I grew up in given a Hollywood slant and presented as fact, I now look at any kind of piece of this variety as a story that happened in someone’s head. It’s hard though to divorce yourself from getting emotional about it…
As a person of Indian origin who has spent exactly one month in India, my feeling is that the depiction of slums was accurate. Is depicting reality sensationalist? Of course, India has it all – beauty and ugliness, tons to admire and love as well as tons to frustrate and despise.