Slumdog Millionaire: The Film, the Reception, the Book, the Global
2012; Salisbury University; Volume: 40; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)South Asian Cinema and Culture
ResumoDanny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire was the runaway commercial hit of 2009 in the United States, nominated for ten Oscars and bagging eight of these, including Best Picture and Best Director. Also included in its trophy bag are seven British Academy Film awards, all four of the Golden Globe awards for which it was nominated, and five Critics' Choice awards. Viewers and critics alike attribute the film's unexpected popularity at the box office to its universal underdog theme: A kid from the slums of Mumbai makes it to the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and wins not only the money but also the girl. A distribution strategy of slow release building on word-of-mouth may also have worked in the film's favor.1 It is likely, too, that the current dismal state of the US and economy played to the film's success, for 2009 was the year in which high numbers of financially strapped consumers took themselves into theaters to lose their woes. But the film's success was not a foregone conclusion. Indeed, at one point, Warner Bros., owner of the rights to the film, felt it was more advisable to avoid an American release altogether and go direcdy to DVD. Yet, when all was said and done, a film that cost $15 million to make grossed close to half a billion dollars worldwide (Box Office Mojo). How is it that a film rooted in the melee of a third-world metropolis achieved this kind of popularity? Given its location, what does it mean that the film was more popular with Western authences? To answer these questions, I locate the phenomenon of Slumdog Millionaire in three sites and sections: the making of the film, its reception in India, and the novel on which it is based. Each section appears discrete yet each speaks to the others in an effort to illuminate a new understanding of the concept of the global. When momentarily unmoored from its hallowed location in the economic arena, in which it attaches itself to processes of free flow of capital, labor, commodities, etc., and in which it has already achieved a hefty empirical truth effect, the global will be seen to apply to the perspective that the film mobilizes and institutes; this perspective needs to be challenged for its effacements and occlusions so that alternative readings may emerge. In brief, I argue that the film's popularity owes much to the filmmakers' prescient ability to select those aspects of local culture that carried over to authences in the West/ North and, by the same token, to suppress other aspects that might have limited the film's scope or otherwise interfered with its appeal to those authences. A closer examination of these effaced and occluded aspects reveals the limits of even such inventive filmmaking as Boyles's and suggests something about current practices in the production, circulation, and reception of cinema. The unproblematized assumption of a street child's point of view, the controversial coining of the title word slumdog, the conversion of the novel's protagonist from a secular composite - Ram Mohammed Thomas - to a fixed and familiar Other (to the West/North) that is Muslim are all examples of the kinds of strategies wielded by the film's perspective at the expense of the novel's wider social critique. The Film Slumdog Millionaire is not a Bollywood film, though it borrows, at times straightforwardly, at other times ironically, from that storied tradition. (Straightforward borrowing: classic Bollywood plot rich in impossible coincidences and moral messages; ironic borrowing: song-and-dance sequence buried at film's end, unconnected to story.) Boyle cites as influences Black Friday (Anurag Kashyap, 2004), a gritty look at Mumbai following the 1993 bomb blasts, and Ram Gopal Varma's Satya (Truth, 1998) and Company (2002), films about Mumbai's crime world (Tsering). But it is telling that Kashyap and Varma are atypical filmmakers in an industry predicated on formulaic successes. Kashyap 's innovative cinematic techniques of camera angle, lighting, and outdoor shooting, his unsettling alternation of close-up and long shots, and the unrelenting focus on realism are not finessed solely with a view to the box office. …
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