Slumdog Porn

Things aren't looking to well for Slumdog Millionaire, the acclaimed film that took the Globe for Best Picture and has been nominated for ten Oscars, including Best Picture.

Most critics loved it, but movie lover (and renowned author of The Satanic Verses, one of my favorite novels) Salman Rushdie told the New York Times that he was part of an initially silent minority - including Mick LaSalle of the San Fransico Chronicle - who had reservations about the film. I wrote my own criticial review in the UVU Review (I swear I didn't come up with the title).

Now this week, it seems that according to The Telegraph in the U.K., the parents of the two eight-year-old child actors in Slumdog Millionaire have risen accusations against the producers, claiming that their children have been exploited. The children have reportedly been paid less than an average Indian servant's sum - in fact, when comparisons were made between their salary and the payment to the Afghan child actors in last year's The Kite Runner, it's substantially less.

Yesterday, the AP reported that the parents of seven-year-old Rubina Qureshi are happy about being a part of the film and claim that the filmmakers and Foxlight has promised to put Rubina through school and has paid her a substantial sum - more than three times the annual adult's salary for the thirty days of shooting.

I don't know if the parents are telling the truth and are getting shushed by the big exec's or if they're lying to get more money out the studio. What's almost more interesting, though, is India's own reaction to Slumdog Millionaire, which is - almost predictably - not completely favorable, according to the Los Angeles Times. (It made me raise my eyebrow to find out that it opened earlier this month in the States but didn't open until just this week in Mumbai, the film's setting.) A few believe that it helps to show a side of India's current problems. Others, however, believe that it's a misleading and all-too-popular portrayal of India's problems that offers glamorized and unrealistic solutions to those problems.

"It's a white man's imagined India," says Shyamal Sengupta, a film professor in Mumbai. "It's not quite snake charmers, but it's close. It's a poverty tour."

Reuters reports that protests have begun in India over the film and Alice Miles, The Times writer, officially cemented a connection between Slumdog Millionaire and the phrase "poverty porn."

What may be of some irony is that the country's own Taare Zameen Par got the shaft for the Academy's foreign film nomination. Taare Zameen Par, arguably a Bollywood film in its own right, tells the story of a young school boy with dyslexia who sees the world in artistic manifestations (through animations and songs). When considering what has been suggested that makes Slumdog Millionaire so fascinating to Western viewers, it's pretty predictable that Slumdog Millionaire is now India's stake in the Oscar race.

(I haven't seen all of Taare Zameen Par, but what I've seen of it is pretty good. The acting is heartfelt, and there's great cinematography.)

Perhaps, like some, you get postcolonialist readings out of the film; this wouldn't be Boyle's first time playing with "(a) the slum exotic; (b) the neoliberal exotic, in which global capital miraculously transforms one's life; and, (c) the criminal exotic". Or maybe, like Rushdie or me, you just think the storytelling is spaghetti (slippery) and the delivery is the strainer (full of holes). Or maybe you really do love the film. Either way, I think Miles' concluding sentiments are pensive enough to co-opt here: "Boyle's most subversive achievement may lie not in revealing the dark underbelly of India - but in revealing ours."