Slumdog Millionaire

drb
Sun, 11 Jan 2009 13:36:33 +0000

I wasn’t sure whether it was trying to give a realistic view or a just a story that had too many coincidences.

This was not a documentary. It used the impoverishment of Indian slumdwellars as a context for a timeless love-story (between a boy and girl and between the 2 brothers), in the same way that Trainspotting used the heroin addiction of Edinburgh punks as the context for an improbable beat-the-odds success story. The game was clearly a device, absurd of course, but effective in a “Usual Suspects” kind of way - bits and pieces that explain the whole.