Honestly, I’m perplexed by the range of reactions that Slumdog has elicited. I liked the movie, had a great time while I was watching it, adored the sound track and cinematography and thought the plot and acting were clichéd. But a week later, I would have forgotten the film if not for all the other hoopla surrounding it.

The core of the controversy seems to be whether the film is exploitative. Who gets exploited (slumdwellers, old India, new India) changes depending on who is levelling the accusation, but each time the claim is that the movie is somehow poverty pr0n.

The main broadside against the film was lobbed by Amitabh who said:

“if SM projects India as [a] third-world, dirty, underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations.” [link]

He later backpedaled, saying that the words were not his own, and that he had put them up merely to start a debate.

Similar criticism came from former ambassador (and Sree’s dad) T P Sreenivasan, who saw the movie as undermining new India:

Having read the novel and seen the film, I cannot say that it has done more good than harm to India. This is not a matter of my wanting to shove the reality under the carpet… the film is exploitation of the novel, of Dharavi, of poverty, of Rahman, of India itself to titillate foreign audiences. It is the exploitation of the new curiosity about India’s success.

Torture is internationally banned and the director of the film knew that India had not joined the global consensus against torture….The torture scenes do not add much to the story, but denigrates India even more than the slums do… As though the depiction of squalor, crime and cruelty is not enough, the film challenges India’s success. [link]

And an anonymous friend of mine summed up his discomfort with the film by saying:

Anything having to do with the third world that masses of white people go into paroxysms over is guilty until proven innocent…

On the other side are writers like Nirpal Dhaliwal in London, who parry Big B’s thrusts arguing that his discomfort with the movie is revealing:

Poor Indians, like those in Slumdog, do not constitute India’s “murky underbelly” as Bachchan moronically describes them. They, in fact, are the nation. Over 80% of Indians live on less than $2.50 (£1.70) a day; 40% on less than $1.25. A third of the world’s poorest people are Indian, as are 40% of all malnourished children. In Mumbai alone, 2.6 million children live on the street or in slums, and 400,000 work in prostitution. But these people are absent from mainstream Bollywood cinema. [link]

David Bordwell, whose extensive review is one of the best I’ve seen and who is actually fairly critical of the movie, responds to Bachchan by pointing out that the first world has also had to deal with depictions of its own poverty in film (and therefore that this is not a First vs. Third World issue):

Indian criticisms of the image of poverty in Slumdog remind me of reactions to Italian Neorealism from authorities concerned about Italy’s image abroad. The government undersecretary Giulio Andreotti claimed that films by Rossellini, De Sica, and others were “washing Italy’s dirty linen in public.”…Liberal American films of the Cold War period were sometimes castigated by members of Congress for playing into the hands of Soviet propagandists. It seems that there will always be people who consider films portraying social injustice to be too negative and failing to see the bright side of things, a side that can always be found if you look hard enough. [link]

It is bizarre to me that both detractors and supporters of the movie agree that the movie is realistic and disagree about whether this realism is shameful or productive. Sure, SDM was a “more realistic” portrayal of India than your average Bolly flick, but that’s like saying that it was a more realistic portrayal of India than Johnny Quest. To me, the film itself remained fantastical, escapist and Dickensian, more Oliver Twist than clever plot twist. I just can’t be bothered to get my chuddies in a knot over it. Show me a realistic portrayal of India, and then we’ll rumble.

Related: Sajaforum’s roundup, everything on Slumdog on UB, and of course, everything we’ve blogged on the topic