The Big City

1963, India, directed by Satyajit Ray (aka Mahanagar)

Ray's exceptional film is a warm, pragmatic depiction of the family dynamics that are cast into sharp relief when a young Calcutta woman elects to take a job in order to supplement her family's income. I had only previously seen Ray's Apu films, so this came as a welcome corrective to the idea that his focus is resolutely rural. Mahanangar provides a rich sense of life in early 1960s Calcutta -- the backdrop of economic precariousness is neatly summarized -- as well as a wonderful heroine (played with exceptional subtlety by Madhabi Mukherjee). 

Ray's particular skill here lies in sketching in each member of the family with a distinct and complex character; the refusal to over-simplify the characterizations creates moments of considerable emotional power (without ever leaving us in doubt who the centre of the story is). The film is also luminously beautiful -- there far too many striking and insightful shots to enumerate, though the effort would be a pleasure. 

(I was inspired to watch the film after it appeared in the Siren's end-of-year roundup of treasures). 

Pather Panchali

1955, India, directed by Satyajit Ray

A big-screen outing for the brand-new restoration of a film I'd only ever seen on TV, this was hugely compelling. It's quite extraordinary how skillful and resourceful Ray already was as a filmmaker, whether in individual shots -- a dolly into a face to emphasize a point, for instance -- or entire sequences, such as that opened and closed by the auntie rocking the infant Apu, or the multiple scenes intercutting parallel action (the children off in search of a train while the mother and auntie interacted, among other examples). Given the shared importance of Italian neo-realism in their development, it was hard not to think of early Sembène, although they are of course very different filmmakers: as much as both were quite consciously creating an alternative to commercial cinema, Sembène was a good deal more uncompromising in that regard, and while he was a very sophisticated filmmaker in terms of his editing and symbolic techniques, from the earliest days, I'm more reserved as to his skill with the camera -- indeed, even quite late in his career I thought he made rather poor use of things like the zoom. Of course, since silky camera movement, for instance, tended to imply commercial filmmaking perhaps this was a more conscious rejection than I give Sembène credit for -- and that's where personal taste also comes in.

Slumdog Millionaire

2008, UK/India, directed by Danny Boyle (and Loveleen Tandan)

It took me a while to come down from the adrenaline high of Slumdog Millionaire to construct some coherent thoughts: like Danny Boyle's earlier films Trainspotting and 28 Days Later the movie hits high gear fast - think of the opening scene in Trainspotting with Ewan McGregor running down a street and freeze-framing in front of a car - and sweeps the audience along somewhat breathlessly to the finale. Just as Trainspotting went beyond cinematic chutzpah to reveal something of the lives of the drug-addled in Edinburgh, Slumdog Millionaire aims to capture the spirit of Mumbai's streets, tracing the city's rapid development - as well as its official change of name from Bombay - since the early 1990s. 

In that, it covers some of the same ground as Mira Nair's 1988 film Salaam Bombay!, also focused on street children, but a much calmer depiction of the lows and occasional highs of life on the edges of Indian society (before the country's major economic changes). Boyle and his screenwriter Simon Beaufoy are, of course, from outside India, but their film doesn't simply come across as a collection of cliches assembled by outsiders: the vibrant images, for instance, are inspired by Bollywood cinema as well as by the splashes of colour in Indian rituals such as Diwali, and are thus grounded in an actual Indian reality. 

The film's set-up exemplifies the idea of a country on the move, straddling a traditional world and a new, globally-minded culture dominated by the young, with the hero, Jamal Malik (Dev Patel, one of the few cast members not based in Indian) a teenager who is appearing on the Indian version of the show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The film is structured around the questions that Jamal is asked: each answer reveals something of his life, for we discover the circumstances where he acquired these fragments of knowledge. It's a little articifial at times - and the filmmakers chafe at their own restrictions, cutting some segments to the bone in order to get back to the main storyline. Still, for the most part it  works, constantly returning us to the nervous movie theatre where Jamal progresses through the game, all the while pitting his wits against both the computer and the host (Anil Kapoor, who hits just the right notes of insincerity as he tries to ensure that the show remains focused on him). 

Since the film opens with a rather brutal scene of police torture, the early sequences on the game show tend toward the light-hearted, as if to soften us up for even crueler realities later: a vignette centered around a rumored appearance by the Indian movie megastar Amitabh Bachchan is one of the funniest movie scenes I've seen in a long time (Amitabh was actually the first host of the real Indian version of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?). Later answers reveal a much darker side to Jamal's life, and while there's a sweet romance at the centre of the film, Boyle rarely soft-pedals reality, showing us brutal acts of violence, and the systematic destruction of childhood innocence; what makes Jamal remarkable is not that he remains innocent but rather that he retains an almost infinite capacity for hope, an idea that's both hopelessly old-fashioned and absolutely compelling to watch. That capacity drives him far more than does the promise of riches, an idea that the other characters can barely understand - and which even the filmmakers occasionally have difficulty following through on.

This is unashamedly rousing film entertainment, effectively casting a spell over the audience, and tapping into the best of popular Hollywood (and Bollywood, to which it pays particular tribute in the unexpected and utterly captivating closing credits sequence); while the visual style (a mix of lighting styles, camera angles, fast cuts and slow-motion effects that might make Tony Scott jealous) is clearly Boyle's, much of the credit for the tremendous performances from the younger cast members goes to his co-director/casting director Loveleen Tandan, no stranger to cross-cultural productions on the subcontinent.

Bride and Prejudice

2004, UK/US, directed by Gurinder Chadha

Gurinder Chadha's Bride and Prejudice is ultimately a rather unfortunate dilution of the Bollywood style, designed to appeal to the multiplex audience. The idea of using the template of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice isn't a bad one - after all, Amy Heckerling's 1995 film Clueless made good use of Austen's Emma in a California high school setting - but the film sticks too closely to the original blueprint and has to cram far too much incident into its running time. The final 20 minutes are particularly compressed as a consequence, but earlier scenes also seem to run disjointedly together (at the more standard Bollywood running time, this probably wouldn't be an issue...).

Things begin brightly enough, with an Indian family in a social whirl, trying to marry off four daughters, and the initial musical segments are lush and often amusing. The opening promise isn't sustained for long, though: the songs quickly become insipid, and are few and far between by the second half of the film, as if a producer somewhere simply ordered them to be snipped. It's also hard to become too involved in such a terribly upwardly-mobile world, which seems to take wealth - even great wealth - entirely for granted, while it's impossible to take the characters' protests about the failure to discover the "real India" too seriously when the film itself whips up such a fairytale version of the country for our consumption - failing, in the process, to understand much of the point of Austen's novel, which made a virtue of its setting among the landed classes.

Water

2005, Canada/India, directed by Deepa Mehta

The title of Deepa Mehta's film functions on a great many levels, beyond the obvious literal importance of the river that plays a major role in the spiritual and material life of the Indian city where the film takes place. The river also operates as a division between rich and poor, something that the townspeople must cross order to access the Brahmin residences - and which the Brahmins see as a convenient barrier. But it also represents the slow, inexorable process of change that is happening in India at the time when the film is set, the late 1930s, with the rise to prominence of Gandhi, bringing with him radical ideas about the the caste system and the position of women in a deeply conservative society. The sense of fluid grace also extends to the limpid filmmaking itself, with a narrative that moves insistently yet serenely forward.

Deepa Mehta's use of colour and enclosed spaces evokes the Afghan film Osama, which also has thematic resonances in terms of its clear-eyed view of the treatment of women in a traditional society; Water focuses particularly on the plight of widows, often forced to withdraw from life following the death of their husbands. The film's main weakness is the rather schematic romance that develops between one of the widows and a politically engaged young man, which seems a little too simplistic given the fraught circumstances, while the references to Gandhi tend to re-affirm the outsider's view that he was the only voice for change in India. However, that shouldn't detract too much from the film's achievements, on the levels of both form and content, nor from the fine, humane performances from the many generations of actresses who play the widows, from elderly women to a child of seven.