Year: 2008
Director: Danny Boyle
Screenplay: Simon Beaufoy, based on the novel Q & A by Vikas Swarup
Starring: Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Madhur Mittal, Anil Kapoor, Irrfan Khan
Running Time: 120 minutes
Genre: Drama
Mumbai: Eighteen year old orphan Jamal Malik (Patel) is one question away from winning the grand prize of 20 million rupees on the Indian version of TV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, when he is arrested by the police on suspicion of cheating. During his brutal interrogation, which includes torture, it is revealed that each of his answers to the questions relate to some incident in his tough life, growing up in the Juhu slum.
This is a film which mixes hard-hitting drama and feel-good romanticism to create a vibrant, entertaining and ultimately uplifting fable. The film moves between Jamal's police interrogation, his appearance on the game show, and flashbacks illustrating his life, triggered by each question. Danny Boyle directs with a kinetic visual style making full use of his large repertoire of cinematic tricks, including fact motion, slow motion, over-saturated colours, superimpositions and more. Mumbai itself makes for a colourful, lively setting, becoming more like a character in it's own right than just a backdrop, and in Boyle's heavy use of overly bright yellow, gold and orange colours in the daylight scenes, you can almost feel the heat radiating from the screen. Dev Patel makes for an engaging lead, with some very good work from Frieda Pinto, in her film debut, as Latika, the girl that Jamal fell in love with when they were children, and has spent most of his life searching for. Madhur Mittal gives an impressive, layered performance Salim, Jamal's volatile older brother. Anil Kapoor plays the slick gameshow host and Irrfan Khan plays the Police Inspector leading the interrogation. The film is sometimes uneven in it's tone, with the grim scenes of life on the streets of Mumbai, at odds with the more whimsical scenes, but by the end the film had won me over. The film is also very funny in places, particularly a scene where a very young Jamal (Aysuh Mahesh Khedekar) goes to extreme lengths to get his favourite movie star's autograph, and a scene set in a call centre.
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