Is Slumdog the posterboy for modern global cinema?

A British director with a British screenplay telling an Indian story based on a book by an Indian author, using predominantly an Indian crew of mixed nationalities - Sound like a global film?

There are certain films and filmmakers that become associated with the zeitgeist or ‘spirit of the times’. The release of Slumdog Millionaire in the UK came only weeks after the attacks in Mumbai and followed the US release which had been timed for awards nominations. This film adaptation of the novel Q & A by Vikas Swarup has quickly established itself in the Top 50 films on IMDB and prompted a media feeding frenzy only intensified by wins at the Golden Globes and predictions of Oscar nominations. Is this the film that finally brings together Western and Indian popular cinema forms? Two of the several important creative personnel behind the film, director Danny Boyle and scriptwriter Simon Beaufoy, were both zeitgeist figures in the mid 1990s when they seemed to have caught something tangible about the mood in Britain and helped to created screen narratives that proved exportable to an international market. Now older, more experienced and possibly wiser, they find themselves in the public eye again. Have they created something similarly ‘of its time’?

Danny Boyle’s second feature was Trainspotting (UK 1996), an adaptation of the Irvine Welsh novel about young Edinburgh heroin users. The film’s success surprised everyone, not least because Boyle’s direction enabled both the comedy and the drama at the heart of the novel to reach an audience beyond the expected target group of young men in the UK.

Simon Beaufoy’s script about redundant steelworkers who become male strippers formed the basis for The Full Monty (UK 1997) – which became one of the most profitable films of all time, costing very little to make but taking over $250 million worldwide.

Boyle’s success led eventually to the unfortunate experience of making a Hollywood film, The Beach in Thailand. It was difficult to make, destroying beaches and proving a disappointment at the box office as well as driving an unhappy Boyle back to television, where his filmmaking career had begun. Simon Beaufoy has said that the success of The Full Monty was like a millstone around his neck because every script he wrote was expected to do $250 million.

But in their time away from the limelight both men kept working in ways which subsequently helped them to bring an Indian story to the screen. Boyle’s return to television took him into experiments with digital video and eventually back to genre-based cinema projects with the highly successful and influential 28 Days Later (UK 2002). The speed and relative low cost of digital shooting on this film was widely noted as a crucial production factor. Meanwhile, Beaufoy stayed in the UK working on television drama scripts and small film projects and trying new forms of writing, including adaptations. In 2004 he wrote the screenplay for Yasmin, a little seen film, part-funded by Channel 4 and focusing on a young British Asian woman caught between family and career at the time of 9/11. He moulded material that came from Asian youth discussion groups set up in the mill towns of Lancashire and West Yorkshire. Channel 4 were one of three partners in producing Slumdog and Fox Searchlight (which had released The Full Monty) was also behind 28 Days Later. When the company picked up Slumdog, following the closure of Warner Independent, Boyle and Beaufoy must have started getting optimistic.

Slumdog Millionaire is a UK feature made in India. Boyle insisted on Indian crews and casting to support a small UK contingent (the young lead actor from UK TV and a core creative team). The production hired Loveleen Tandon as both co-director and local casting agent. (Tandan has worked on ‘incoming productions’ by Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta as well as the UK production of Brick Lane, so she sounds a sensible selection.) Boyle also hired Bollywood crews. The resulting film does not look like a British film made in India – it looks (and sounds, especially via A. R. Rahman’s score) like a New Wave popular Indian film. Boyle’s skill with young actors and his sheer energy and invention with the camera enable him to make Beaufoy’s script work in ways that are immediately accessible to a mainstream audience in the UK and the US.

India is now high profile again in the West, mostly perhaps because of the new awareness of the growth rate of its economy. Although much of the film offers a representation of urban poverty in India, other aspects focus on cultural experiences that are shared between India and the West – the television quiz show and the call centre business (with good British jokes) are the obvious connections. For these reasons, the hype that surrounds the film is understandable. Celebrity profiles in the UK (usually written by journalists with no specialist knowledge of film) have heralded Danny Boyle as ‘Britain’s leading filmmaker’ (to quote Alexander Linklater in The Observer of 4/1/09 in an otherwise useful background study). Boyle is indeed one of the most important directors in the UK, but this sudden praise demeans both his own earlier work, which is equally as good, and that of other major UK directors with similar status. On the other hand, the Guardian’s influential film critic, Peter Bradshaw, has damned the film with faint praise as “a cheerfully undemanding and unreflective film with a vision of India that, if not touristy exactly, is certainly an outsider's view; it depends for its full enjoyment on not being taken too seriously” – and thus unworthy of the awards that might be bestowed upon it.

These two commentators don’t know (don’t want to consider?) the Indian cinema styles that the film engages with nor the earlier attempt to portray similar characters in Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay. They seem also to have ignored Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart – filmed on digital on the streets of Karachi, Pune and Mumbai in 2006 (and casting Slumdog’s Irfaan Khan as a police interrogator). In interviews, Boyle has mentioned Nair, Aamir Khan and Ram Gopal Varma as directors he has studied (see Sight & Sound, February 2009) and he shares much of the same background and industry relationships as Winterbottom.

My own view is that Slumdog Millionaire is indeed a modern global film that, seemingly effortlessly, combines UK and Indian film conventions (despite Boyle’s protestations that he doesn’t know that he is doing it). I enjoyed the film immensely and reject the attempts to dismiss it as ‘not serious’. Its importance may be that it gives confidence to others to try to tell other Indian stories with a similar feel. However, I hope I’m not naive – a few minutes perusing both reviews and ‘user comments’ on the film reveals that many critics and audiences in the West have some way to go before they can engage with Indian popular culture. Perhaps if some of the younger and more adventurous Indian directors were to come to the UK and follow the Boyle approach to make films in English (and Hindi, if relevant to the story) that an international audience would enjoy, we might begin to make progress.

Roy Stafford a film lecturer and writer working on film education with cinemas in the North of England. Roy was also the editor of In the Picture magazine from 1990 to 2008.