Slumdog and me

This isn’t the sort of article I thought I’d be writing for this blog. It’s something of a movie review. At the same time it isn’t – it’s really of a review of my reaction to one.

I saw the film Slumdog Millionaire ten days or so ago, and have been musing on and off ever since about how it affected me.

Wow. What a powerful film. I’d not read anything about it before my wife and me went to see it on an icy Friday night. I knew it was about a young man from the slums of an Indian city winning the TV program Who Wants to be a Millionaire, but that was it.

The film starts with a torture scene. I wasn’t prepared for that, and found it very disturbing. About 30 minutes or so in, I was wondering what I was doing in the cinema. I was very uncomfortable with the violence and poverty. I felt profoundly sorry for the three children I was watching – Jamal, his older brother Salim, and a girl they’d met called Latika. Their parents were dead. Murdered senselessly in the name of religion. There they were, not much older than my own children, alone in the world and uncared for.This, of course, is meant to be uncomfortable viewing. I, however, felt uncomfortable to the point that I wanted to get up and leave – their situation felt almost unbearable to me, and I dreaded what might happen next.

And what happened next was even worse. The barbaric cruelty of the ganglord owner of the orphanage was horrific, and when Jamal and Salim escaped on the train, but Latika didn’t make it, I instantly thought she was dead. Sadness engulfed me. It does again now, just writing about it.

As the rest of the movie unfolded, I started to feel less uncomfortable. There was more violence, but it was metered out to the bad guys, and Jamal and Salim both thrived. Latika wasn’t dead! That all felt good. I was becoming part of the movie – I was feeling what the characters were going through. I could feel Jamal’s guilt at leaving Latika behind. I understood why he had to find her and rescue her.

Unsurprisingly, I came out of the cinema feeling drained. I also felt very unsettled. Had I liked the film? Kind of. I disliked a lot of the feelings it raised in me. And something didn’t quite sit right either. After some thought I realised that the hyper-reality of the violence-filled slum life with all it’s ganglords and cruelty didn’t seem to work for me against the light and frankly unrealistic game show sequences. Logic was at play here – I could believe the slum side of the film, but not the TV show – that simply didn’t make sense.

I’d missed something in the film, however, as my wife pointed out. The film was really the story of Jamal’s love for Latika. It was a love story! How could I miss that? I felt entwined in the character’s lives – like I was really there with them, and yet I missed what was really the central thrust of the story. I knew Jamal felt like he had to rescue Latika – that was obvious – but to me it simply looked like guilt was driving him. He’d allowed her to get left behind when they escaped on the train – left behind to goodness knows what fate. Even when they finally escaped at the end I saw it just as that. I saw their escape, not their love.

When I watch a film, particularly at a cinema, then I tend to live it. I can empathise with the characters intensely, and I think I feel what they are feeling. Films with a linear timeline affect me most – I get really sucked in. A linear timeline fits well with my linear emotions. The film flows, and so do my emotions – it’s something of a rollercoaster of a ride. Slumdog, however, is telling two different threads of the story at the same time, and thus the timeline jumps backwards and forwards. I think that unsettles me, as I have to reframe the little version of the film’s world that I’ve created for myself. Maybe that had some part to play to why I found the film unsettling.

It’s only ten days since I saw the film, yet when I came to write this article I had to look up Jamal’s name. It had gone from my memory. In the car on the way home from the film, I could remember Jamal’s name, but neither Salim nor Latika. How could that be the case? I’d just sat through an intense two hours with these characters. Characters who referred to each other by name frequently. I’d got sucked into the emotions of the story, yet I couldn’t remember their names.

In reality, this problem happens to me all the time in normal life. When I change jobs, it takes me weeks to learn the names of my new colleagues. It takes me days to remember the names of those sitting right next to me. I have to draw out a little desk plan, and fill in people’s names as I hear them, otherwise I end up embarrassed.

All of this has clearly rattled me.

Ultimately it’s my one-at-a-time linear emotions that mean that I failed to spot the love story in the film. I spend my life feeling one intense emotion at a time, one after the other. The complexity of mutiple emotions at the same time doesn’t seem to apply to me. Guilt was the one emotion I felt for Jamal’s interactions with Latika. There was no room in my version of the story for anything else.

No related posts.