Tiny budget, unknown cast, no
Americans - and massive critical,
commercial and Oscar success.
Austin McHale explains how
Slumdog Millionaire thrived on its
freedom from Hollywood.
London. February. Slumdog Millionaire has
just swooped through the grey slush of the West
Media language
End in a blaze of colour and sound to scoop
the poster, a kaleidoscope of energy and colour.
seven BAFTA awards, including Best Film and Best
Against an impressionistic cityscape of blurred
Director and an extraordinary eight Oscars. Yet
this film does not fit the template of Hollywood
neon lighting, a boy and a girl burst through the
darkness, both in motion but facing opposite
The media language of the film is indicated in
success. There are no American accents, few
ways. Anxiety but also hope is clear in their tense
special effects and no big stars. It is the antithesis
expressions. The lettering of the title is ragged,
of glamour - a climactic sequence involves the
hero, a Mumbai slum kid, diving through a cesspit
and emerging covered in very realistic excrement
(in fact peanut butter and chocolate), all to get
a signed photograph of a Bollywood actor. Yet
it has achieved the Holy Grail of cinema - made
cheaply, it appeals to many different audiences,
has become a critical and popular success and is
set to make huge profits. How has a low budget
British film reconciled these opposites without
selling its soul? Perhaps our old friend MIGRAIN,
inducer of headaches to generations of Media
Students, can offer us a way in.
uneven, lowercase, progressing from the red of
danger to the yellow of hope. In the foreground
is the familiar graphic design of a question from
the quiz show Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
doubling as the tag line, 'What does it take to find
a lost love?'. The theme and narrative are outlined,
the fragmented urban, visual style powerfully
established.
The cinematography of the film is unusual for
an Oscar contender. The Mumbai street scenes
are filmed with a kinetic energy and a gritty
realism which recalls documentary rather than
Hollywood - or Bollywood - studio glamour.
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This look is achieved through the use of small,
stage, because Mumbai streets are so loud.
very manoeuvrable digital video cameras
However, to Danny Boyle Mumbai street sounds
and on occasion the stuttering images of still
cameras at 11 frames per second, far slower
were essential signifiers of the slums, so
the diegetic sounds stayed. The non-diegetic
than normal film camera speed. This key artistic
musical score was just as important, aiming at
decision was to some extent forced on the film
a fusion of styles to engage Western as well
crew. The influence of mainstream Indian cinema
as Indian audiences. The basic soundtrack was
is so pervasive in Mumbai that filming in the
composed by the famous Bollywood musician
slums with traditional large cameras would have
A.R. Rahman, but it was overlaid by an urban
encouraged stylised Bollywood moves rather
than realistic behaviour, so the film-makers
Hip-Hop and Rap track prominently featuring
the British Sri-Lankan MIA, reflecting the eclectic
had to disguise themselves as tourists and film
'masala' mixture both of Mumbai and of
unobserved to achieve the naturalism that they
Western cities.
wanted.
Sound - non-Bollywood style
Another significant aspect of media language
is sound, 70% of the impact of a film according to
Institutional perspectives
Institutionally Slumdog Millionaire is a
fascinating case study. It was made for 13 million
dollars, a tiny sum compared with the 167
director Danny Boyle. As with visual language,
million dollars of Oscar rival The Curious Case of
creative decisions in this area involved a radical
Benjamin Button, largely raised via the French
departure from the Bollywood norm. Bollywood
and British production companies Pathe and
films are made largely on sound stages, with
Film4. For a film with an almost entirely Indian
music and ambient noise dubbed on at a later
cast and no stars apart from the Bollywood
Indian actor Anil Kapoor, even this budget
would have been a challenge to raise without
Boyle's track record as the director of a series of
low budget, profitable and critically successful
films such as Trainspotting, 28 Days Later and
Millions. Casting threw up an unusual problem.
Boyle was committed to casting locally, but every
actor with Bollywood ambitions was implausibly
'buff' for a slumdog, having worked out every
day in the approved Bollywood manner. Boyle
discussed this with his 17-year-old daughter
one evening and received the following piece
of succinct advice, 'If you want a loser, have a
look at Skins!' Hence the inspired casting of Dev
Patel, who can project vulnerability as well as
determination, and whose slow, shy smile is one
of the delights of the film.
Slumdog Millionaire, like all Danny Boyle's
films, is difficult to pigeonhole in generic terms.
It is a hybrid of gritty realism and aspiration, of
drama documentary and love story. 'Feelgood;
with its connotations of cliche and stereotype, is
a description understandably resisted by Boyle,
but despite the poverty, the child torture and the
prostitution, it is indisputably an uplifting film.
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April 20091 MedlaMagazine
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Genre connections
Slumdog Millionaire's representation of
Mumbai is starkly different from two familiar
though opposite stereotypes. One is the
glamorous dreamworld of Bollywood, in which
no-one is poor (for long, at least) and in which
characters more likely to be seen dancing on
a Swiss mountain or a Scottish glen than in a
Mumbai railway station. The other is the English
tabloid newspaper nightmare of teeming,
unsanitary ghettoes populated by passive
recipients of Western charity, where the only
growth industries are begging, prostitution and
terrorism. By contrast the slumdogs of the film
are resourceful, energetic and independent
citizens of one of the world's great cities - 20
million and growing. This positive ideology,
that poverty and apathy can be conquered by
communal celebration, is exemplified in the film's
final sequence. As the credits roll, Dev Patel and
co-star Frieda Pinto are joined by what appears
to be the whole of Mumbai in an exuberant
dance number. The location is the city's main
railway station, the Chapatri Shivaji Terminus,
host to a thriving sub-culture of recent rural
immigrants, the main artery of Mumbai. It was
also one of the sites of a murderous terrorist
attack last November which made headlines
internationally. Despite the film sequence being
shot many months before, it is being seen in India
as a positive counterbalance to the images of a
burning, blood-soaked Mumbai which led the TV
news bulletins worldwide.
Audience and ideology
This iconic sequence appeals to many different
audiences. It can be seen as the film's one
major concession to Bollywood, an explosion
of sound and spectacle which is likely to attract
a mainstream Indian audience. The energy of
the youthful dancers, the frequent close-ups of
the familiar face of Dev Patel and the Hip-Hop/
Bollywood fusion of the soundtrack will hold
a Western audience, particularly the sought­
after demographic of 16-25 with its high level
of disposable income. Finally the aspirational
ideology, the community's refusal to be defined
by the squalor of the slums, their commitment
24 MedlaMagazine I April 20091 english and media centre
to celebration, growth and change, intersects
term implying that Mumbai citizens are less than
with the narrative arc of classic Hollywood
human, when Danny Boyle's preferred meaning
cinema, in which seemingly impossible obstacles
are overcome in order to fulfil a dream. This is
is clearly intended to be an echo of'underdog;
evoking connotations of bravery, resilience
attractive to mainstream Western media outlets.
and moral justification. To me, these spectacular
Narrative structure
standpoints. Indeed, cynical observers have seen
This dream, however, is not the traditional
American Dream. Comfort and wealth are
apparently promised by the film's narrative
misreadings are travesties of the film's ideological
them as evidence of a 'dirty tricks' campaign,
orchestrated by unscrupulous publicists of rival
films in the run-up to the Oscars. Large amounts
structure, cleverly built around the cumulative
of money have been invested, for example, in the
questions of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
effects-laden Brangelina vehicle The Curious Case
which, remarkably, all relate to incidents in Jamal
of Benjamin Button (five years in the making and
Malik's (Dev Patel's) life. However, this apparent
13 times the cost of Slumdog Millionaire), and of
endorsement of a crudely materialist ideology is
course the best short-cut to recouping costs and
skilfully undercut, both by the corruption of Anil
Kapoor's quizmaster and by Jamal's motivation
should a cheap British film, entirely shot in India
for success, which it would be unfair to reveal.
It can in fact be read as a sly critique of the
making a sizeable profit is via Oscar success. Why
without one American star, win a competition
devised by Hollywood studios for Hollywood
system of values in our status-obsessed
studios? Perhaps for the same reason that a
society, which prioritises uncontextualised
Mumbai 'charwallah' (tea boy) from the slums
academic knowledge over the real human
should win a competition devised by the Indian
experience acquired painfully by Jamal in the
elite for the Indian elite - to expose prejudice
slums of Mumbai.
Much publicity has recently been given to
and celebrate our common humanity. After the
more negative views of the film. It has been
film's spectacular success at the Oscars, we now
know that the slumdog can become a millionaire
accused of poverty porn, implying that the
twice over.
harsh life of the slums is merely a picturesque
travelogue catering for Western audiences, who
Austin McHale is Head of Media Studies at Ellen Wilkinson
remain distanced from and uninvolved in the
events they see. The slum dwellers, it is said,
School, Ealing.
are patronised and stereotyped. Most bizarrely,
Image•.rom 5/umdog Millionolre courtesy of image.net
Slumdog Millionaire is said to be a derogatory
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