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Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008)

Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008)

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EMPIRE — ✪✪✪✪✪

When the unlikely Jamal (Patel) gets through round-upon-round of India’s Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, he is arrested for cheating. During the interrogation, as he tells his tragic life story, it seems fate may be calling the shots...

Danny Boyle, you may recall, was all but canonised for propelling a gang of heroin-abusing scamps through the seething backstreets of Edinburgh to the unearthly rumble of Iggy Pop’s basalt lungs. Amid Trainspotting’s amoral characters and Scorsesian visual rhetoric, the camera an urgent, unpredictable participant in its dramatic shimmer, something unforgettable was born. Sadly, while we banged drums and rattled tambourines like Hari Krishnas on the march, it didn’t prove the revolution in British filmmaking, indeed all filmmaking, we had yearned for. Boyle went off to make good films, interesting films, but the dervish in him laid dormant.

How strange, then, that it would take a contemporary fable set among the roiling slums of Mumbai, and, more bizarrely, on India’s version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, to reignite that lust for life...

At first sight, this adaptation of Vikas Swarup’s novel, Q&A, sounds as ripe as a watermelon: a rags-to-riches parable of a lowly urchin, luckless but streetwise, whose quiz show triumph enthrals a nation. Dreamily his inspiration is not the worldly promise of a “fucking big television”, but the chance to rescue the loveliest girl in the world. The question is, how has this ignorant chai-wallah gotten so far? The answer is the film itself.

Like the picaresque of Trainspotting, Simon Beaufoy’s feisty script is knowingly contrived. Between the comic tensions of the Millionaire rounds — veteran Anil Kapoor sneering splendidly as the Indian Tarrant — we plunge back in time in search of a life. The effect is less flashbacks than a cascade of stories transporting Jamal (Dev Patel) and his sneaky brother Salim (Madhur Mittal) from infants to boys, to teens, to the brink of riches. Could destiny itself have given him the answers? Knowledge, the film fancies, isn’t learned; it is survived.

The key to early Boyle was that he was actually doing Dickens’ Gothic underworlds jacked up on Underworld. If Shallow Grave is A Christmas Carol, where the three ghosts becomes a trio of solipsistic flatmates, then Trainspotting is David Copperfield, the callow hero hindered less by poverty than the raging urge for hard drugs. Slumdog repaints Oliver Twist in the fruit-bowl palette of an India where orphans are scooped off midnight’s streets by a dapper Fagin to be trained as beggars, later to give Jamal his Great Expectations and a cool Estella in the form of Latika (Freida Pinto: easily the most beautiful thing you will see on a screen in 2009).

Jamal is, of course, accused of cheating (how could it be otherwise?), and before we’ve even acclimatised, the police are making their enquires with the help of a car battery. Get ready — there will be as much discomfort as joy. Later, the camera barely blinks as a child’s eyes are put out with a molten-spoon. Yet, by Boyle’s law, for every degradation there is an equal and opposite celebration, or at least cackle of loud, local humour.

Through the ever-seeking direction, and Anthony Dod Mantle’s unstoppable camera, Mumbai becomes the inevitable ‘other’ character, mother to 15 million. This, we find, is a city in transition, where call centres and fucking-big televisions leer over street-lepers and Hindu shrines. The caste system has gone vertical, up the cathedral-like skyscrapers with the slumdogs at their feet.

Yes, it’s tapping Scorsese again in the fevered montages that dance to the infectious rhythms of A. R. Rahman’s East-West spanning score, and that sense of being constantly in motion. But strip away the arty dissolves and handheld chases through Mumbai’s clutter, and you’ll find something divisively old-fashioned.

At heart, this is Hollywood melodrama, Capra’s wish-fulfilment parlayed into a new world (that Jamal is an Indian Muslim rarely impacts). The film, fashion be damned, is just thrillingly upbeat.

Danny Boyle's finest since Trainspotting. In fact, it's the best British/Indian gameshow-based romance of the millennium.

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Contexts Of Film

Context

Social

Mumbai is shown as a city of extreme contrasts, where huge wealth and “global” consumer life sit alongside large-scale informal housing, insecure work, and limited sanitation.
Dharavi is presented as densely populated and highly networked, with community routines, small enterprise, and constant pressure on space and basic services.
Childhood is shown as precarious for many, with street survival (running, hiding, hustling, stealing) normalised by poverty and weak protection systems.
Organised exploitation of children is a key social threat, with the film depicting forced begging rackets, coercion, and violence as a route to profit.
Poverty is shown as structural and inherited, with a narrow range of “routes out” and a constant risk of being pushed further down by violence, corruption, or chance.
Caste is a long-running system of inherited social groups. People are usually born into a group, and it can shape status, opportunities, and who mixes with whom.
Caste is not the same as class. Class is mainly economic position, while caste is inherited social identity. They overlap, so inequality can be both economic and social.

Cultural

Bollywood is treated as a mass cultural force that reaches every social class, signalled through Amitabh Bachchan as a cultural icon and the way cinema is woven into daily aspiration.
The final dance sequence nods to Bollywood convention, using an upbeat closure that contrasts with much of the film’s harsh realism.
The film’s “destiny” motif (“It is written”) draws on religious and cultural ideas of fate and predestination, repeated as dialogue and as a structural message.
Popular television is framed as a shared national ritual, with families and crowds gathering to watch, turning private life into public spectacle.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is structured as a climb through a fixed ladder of multiple-choice questions, each worth increasing prize money.
Each question has four possible answers, and contestants must “lock in” a choice, so the format turns knowledge into a public, performative decision under pressure.
The format uses “lifelines” to extend suspense and give the contestant limited help, such as removing wrong answers or contacting someone for advice.
The format usually includes “safe” prize levels, so a wrong answer can drop winnings back to a guaranteed amount, which increases risk and tension.
The quiz-show format becomes a cultural language the audience already understands, so tension is communicated through familiar rules, rituals, and catchphrases.
The film presents a hybrid cultural identity, blending Indian popular forms (music, melodrama, romance) with Western crime-thriller pace and editing energy.
Language and subtitles contribute to realism, while also raising questions about perspective when Mumbai is presented to global audiences.

Historical

The film references the Mumbai (Bombay) riots of 1992–93, which follow the demolition of the Babri Masjid and include waves of communal violence in the city.
This matters because the riots are shown as the moment that kills Jamal’s mother and turns the boys into displaced, vulnerable street children almost overnight.
The film gestures toward Mumbai’s “world-class city” redevelopment drive in the 2000s, where slum clearance and relocation reshape neighbourhoods and livelihoods.
The skyline and high-rises that replace slum space symbolise the historical shift toward global-city image-making and property-driven growth.
The 2006 setting sits in post-liberalisation India, when wealth inequality becomes more visible in major cities and consumer culture expands.
Outsourcing and call-centre growth form part of the period background, linking Mumbai to global service labour and English-language corporate work.

Political

Policing is represented as coercive and unevenly applied, including intimidation and torture, reflecting power imbalances between the state and the urban poor.
The riots reference political mobilisation around religion and identity, showing how communal politics can produce lethal consequences for civilians and deepen insecurity for minorities.
Slum clearance is implicitly political, linked to governance decisions about land, legality, and whose housing counts as legitimate in the city.
The film raises questions about rights and citizenship, including access to security, housing, and fair treatment in the justice system.
The game show functions as a meritocratic fantasy, selling the idea anyone can rise, even as the wider story shows structural barriers.
Reservation (affirmative action) is part of modern Indian political context around caste inequality, with places set aside in education and some public-sector jobs for historically disadvantaged groups.

Institutional

UK film production and global distribution context matters, because the film is designed for international circulation and uses a style that can play clearly to a wide audience.
The film’s success and controversy support discussion about representation, including who gets to tell these stories and how poverty is framed for international audiences.
Casting and performance style combine local specificity with internationally recognisable storytelling conventions.
The narrative is engineered for mass appeal, using the quiz-show “hook”, question-based reveals, and cross-cutting to sustain momentum.

Technological

Smaller, more mobile cameras enable filming in tight, crowded locations and support a “you are there” handheld immediacy.
Boyle’s signature style is visible in the kinetic technique, including fast cutting, whip-like camera movement, aggressive cross-cutting, and sound bridges that push pace and create urgency.
Fast cutting, cross-cutting, and sound bridges make the non-linear narrative feel urgent and coherent, turning editing into the film’s main storytelling engine.
The quiz-show environment is a technology of spectacle, using lighting, screens, music cues, and timing to manufacture tension and public drama.
The call-centre setting foregrounds computers and telecom systems as everyday infrastructure of global labour, even for workers at the bottom of the hierarchy.
The film’s dense urban soundscape and music fusion underline a mediated city life, where broadcast culture, advertising, and mass entertainment are always present. </aside>

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Idea Bucket

Narrative Structure

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Slumdog Millionaire

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