Slumdog article

Freedom from Hollywood – Slumdog Millionaire (Mediamag)

Tiny budget, unknown cast, no Americans – and massive critical, commercial and Oscar success. Austin McHale explains how Slumdog Millionaire thrived on its freedom from Hollywood.
London. February. Slumdog Millionaire has just swooped through the grey slush of the West End in a blaze of colour and sound to scoop seven BAFTA awards, including Best Film and Best Director and an extraordinary eight Oscars. Yet this film does not fit the template of Hollywood success. There are no American accents, few special effects and no big stars. It is the antithesis of glamour – a climactic sequence involves the hero, a Mumbai slum kid, diving through a cesspit and emerging covered in very realistic excrement (in fact peanut butter and chocolate), all to get a signed photograph of a Bollywood actor. Yet it has achieved the Holy Grail of cinema – made cheaply, it appeals to many different audiences, has become a critical and popular success and is set to make huge profits. How has a low budget British film reconciled these opposites without selling its soul? Perhaps our old friend MIGRAIN, inducer of headaches to generations of Media Students, can offer us a way in.
Media language
The media language of the film is indicated in the poster, a kaleidoscope of energy and colour. Against an impressionistic cityscape of blurred neon lighting, a boy and a girl burst through the darkness, both in motion but facing opposite ways. Anxiety but also hope is clear in their tense expressions. The lettering of the title is ragged, uneven, lowercase, progressing from the red of danger to the yellow of hope. In the foreground is the familiar graphic design of a question from the quiz show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? doubling as the tag line, ‘What does it take to find a lost love?’. The theme and narrative are outlined, the fragmented urban, visual style powerfully established.
The cinematography of the film is unusual for an Oscar contender. The Mumbai street scenes are filmed with a kinetic energy and a gritty realism which recalls documentary rather than Hollywood – or Bollywood – studio glamour. This look is achieved through the use of small, very manoeuvrable digital video cameras and on occasion the stuttering images of still cameras at 11 frames per second, far slower than normal film camera speed. This key artistic decision was to some extent forced on the film crew. The influence of mainstream Indian cinema is so pervasive in Mumbai that filming in the slums with traditional large cameras would have encouraged stylised Bollywood moves rather than realistic behaviour, so the film-makers had to disguise themselves as tourists and film unobserved to achieve the naturalism that they wanted.
Sound – non-Bollywood style
Another significant aspect of media language is sound, 70% of the impact of a film according to director Danny Boyle. As with visual language, creative decisions in this area involved a radical departure from the Bollywood norm. Bollywood films are made largely on sound stages, with music and ambient noise dubbed on at a later stage, because Mumbai streets are so loud. However, to Danny Boyle Mumbai street sounds were essential signifiers of the slums, so the diegetic sounds stayed. The non-diegetic musical score was just as important, aiming at a fusion of styles to engage Western as well as Indian audiences. The basic soundtrack was composed by the famous Bollywood musician A.R. Rahman, but it was overlaid by an urban Hip-Hop and Rap track prominently featuring the British Sri-Lankan MIA, reflecting the eclectic ‘masala’ mixture both of Mumbai and of Western cities.
Institutional perspectives
Institutionally Slumdog Millionaire is a fascinating case study. It was made for 13 million dollars, a tiny sum compared with the 167 million dollars of Oscar rival The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, largely raised via the French and British production companies Pathé and Film4. For a film with an almost entirely Indian cast and no stars apart from the Bollywood Indian actor Anil Kapoor, even this budget would have been a challenge to raise without Boyle’s track record as the director of a series of low budget, profitable and critically successful films such as Trainspotting, 28 Days Later and Millions. Casting threw up an unusual problem. Boyle was committed to casting locally, but every actor with Bollywood ambitions was implausibly ‘buff’ for a slumdog, having worked out every day in the approved Bollywood manner. Boyle discussed this with his 17-year-old daughter one evening and received the following piece of succinct advice, ‘If you want a loser, have a look at Skins!’ Hence the inspired casting of Dev Patel, who can project vulnerability as well as determination, and whose slow, shy smile is one of the delights of the film.
Slumdog Millionaire, like all Danny Boyle’s films, is difficult to pigeonhole in generic terms. It is a hybrid of gritty realism and aspiration, of drama documentary and love story. ‘Feelgood’, with its connotations of cliché and stereotype, is a description understandably resisted by Boyle, but despite the poverty, the child torture and the prostitution, it is indisputably an uplifting film.
Genre connections
Slumdog Millionaire’s representation of Mumbai is starkly different from two familiar though opposite stereotypes. One is the glamorous dreamworld of Bollywood, in which no-one is poor (for long, at least) and in which characters more likely to be seen dancing on a Swiss mountain or a Scottish glen than in a Mumbai railway station. The other is the English tabloid newspaper nightmare of teeming, unsanitary ghettoes populated by passive recipients of Western charity, where the only growth industries are begging, prostitution and terrorism. By contrast the slumdogs of the film are resourceful, energetic and independent citizens of one of the world’s great cities – 20 million and growing. This positive ideology, that poverty and apathy can be conquered by communal celebration, is exemplified in the film’s final sequence. As the credits roll, Dev Patel and co-star Frieda Pinto are joined by what appears to be the whole of Mumbai in an exuberant dance number. The location is the city’s main railway station, the Chapatri Shivaji Terminus, host to a thriving sub-culture of recent rural immigrants, the main artery of Mumbai. It was also one of the sites of a murderous terrorist attack last November which made headlines internationally. Despite the film sequence being shot many months before, it is being seen in India as a positive counterbalance to the images of a burning, blood-soaked Mumbai which led the TV news bulletins worldwide.
Audience and ideology
This iconic sequence appeals to many different audiences. It can be seen as the film’s one major concession to Bollywood, an explosion of sound and spectacle which is likely to attract a mainstream Indian audience. The energy of the youthful dancers, the frequent close-ups of the familiar face of Dev Patel and the Hip-Hop/Bollywood fusion of the soundtrack will hold a Western audience, particularly the sought-after demographic of 16-25 with its high level of disposable income. Finally the aspirational ideology, the community’s refusal to be defined by the squalor of the slums, their commitment to celebration, growth and change, intersects with the narrative arc of classic Hollywood cinema, in which seemingly impossible obstacles are overcome in order to fulfil a dream. This is attractive to mainstream Western media outlets.
Narrative structure
This dream, however, is not the traditional American Dream. Comfort and wealth are apparently promised by the film’s narrative structure, cleverly built around the cumulative questions of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? which, remarkably, all relate to incidents in Jamal Malik’s (Dev Patel’s) life. However, this apparent endorsement of a crudely materialist ideology is skilfully undercut, both by the corruption of Anil Kapoor’s quizmaster and by Jamal’s motivation for success, which it would be unfair to reveal. It can in fact be read as a sly critique of the system of values in our status-obsessed society, which prioritises uncontextualised academic knowledge over the real human experience acquired painfully by Jamal in the slums of Mumbai.
Much publicity has recently been given to more negative views of the film. It has been accused of poverty porn, implying that the harsh life of the slums is merely a picturesque travelogue catering for Western audiences, who remain distanced from and uninvolved in the events they see. The slum dwellers, it is said, are patronised and stereotyped. Most bizarrely, Slumdog Millionaire is said to be a derogatory term implying that Mumbai citizens are less than human, when Danny Boyle’s preferred meaning is clearly intended to be an echo of ‘underdog’, evoking connotations of bravery, resilience and moral justification. To me, these spectacular misreadings are travesties of the film’s ideological standpoints. Indeed, cynical observers have seen them as evidence of a ‘dirty tricks’ campaign, orchestrated by unscrupulous publicists of rival films in the run-up to the Oscars. Large amounts of money have been invested, for example, in the effects-laden Brangelina vehicle The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (five years in the making and 13 times the cost of Slumdog Millionaire), and of course the best short-cut to recouping costs and making a sizeable profit is via Oscar success. Why should a cheap British film, entirely shot in India without one American star, win a competition devised by Hollywood studios for Hollywood studios? Perhaps for the same reason that a Mumbai ‘charwallah’ (teaboy) from the slums should win a competition devised by the Indian elite for the Indian elite – to expose prejudice and celebrate our common humanity. After the film’s spectacular success at the Oscars, we now know that the slumdog can become a millionaire twice over.