Slumdog Millionaire
After a film festival is before a film festival, or something. The PIFF is coming up, the second biggest “film festival” of my life besides the Berlinale, and I made a list of films I would propose to watch. Last year, we randomly watched two films in an actual movie theater during an actual film festival, and besides that we only saw 3 films in those 4 days in Lisbon. We will see how it goes this time, but the very act of picking films for this occasion made me feel excited about watching movies. (Much unlike going through Netflix or my own to-watch lists, where I typically don’t really feel like watching that stuff. The only list that sparks this kind of joy, to put it in the words of Marie Kondo, is my list from the Film of the Day thread, courtesy of Shii and Gorp.) I feel like a little girl about to discover the big world, and considering how I haven’t really felt like watching a film ever since the Berlinale ended, I am quite happy that the feeling came back just in time for the PIFF.
I mean, heck, I watched “Slumdog Millionaire” in January! All of that really feels like ages ago. However, and this refers to this posting’s title, there is a benefit in not writing a blog post instantly. Maybe my first impressions are now lost, and often I end up not writing much about a film when I have forgotten a lot of its details, but sometimes time can only tell which details have made a large impact on me. I watched Poulenc’s “Dialogue des Carmélites” at the Komische Oper (in a surprisingly amazing production by Calixto Bieito no less!) and until today, I am being haunted by the final scene. It’s perhaps the most intense scene in all opera, and this is impressive because I was largely bored and a little taken aback by all that came before. I recently added the opera to the list of operas I want to see again simply because of its ending (and I just read that Tcherniakov changed the ending – that was a shock, but I am curious too).
Alright, I digress. My point was that having let time pass allowed me to focus on the things I remember the most about “Slumdog Millionaire”, which was that boy having his ears being destroyed. That one also haunts me until today, and I honestly cannot understand how the film is being marketed as a feel-good film when there is so much pain and suffering shown in it. Do people just ignore it? Do they just think “ah, they are Indian kids in slums, it’s alright”? I am guilty of usually ignoring what is bad in the world, but when it’s so obviously in your face (even if it’s a piece of fiction), how can you feel good about it?
Other than that, I remember the film as a Western film with Indian looks. With Chinese films, there are always elements that make people go “ah, it’s totally made for the Western audience” (a problem that Japanese or Korean films don’t really have as much), which is especially amusing since Hollywood films nowadays have elements totally aiming at its Chinese audience, and “Slumdog Millionaire” seemed to have a lot of these kinds of elements, especially in the humor department. There are no cultural inside jokes, not even the cultural subtleties you see in Japanese or Korean films which alienates but also fascinates people outside of the culture. This kid from the slums acts like he’s a British kid put into the body of an Indian slum-dweller, and then takes it from there.
Of course “Slumdog Millionaire” was a lot of fun. I enjoyed the ride and it pushes all the right buttons to make for a very entertaining evening. Freida Pinto is also immensely beautiful, and I am impressed that she and Dev Patel ended up dating – seems to be a Hollywood thing nowadays, like the Twilight couple.