Slumdog Millionaire

Hay every one
The director has never been shy of manipulating emotions and characters to crank out the maximum screen emotion. The scented backdrops and flavours of Mumbai dilute the crude liberties that Boyle occasionally inflicts on the melodrama.
The fact that these memories stack up into neat answers is spookily inconvenient if you’re a poisonous bastard such as Anil Kapoor’s deliciously smug television host. Or an emotionally detached viewer. Indeed Slumdog Millionaire is guilty of all sorts of implausible twists, not least a thundery long-distance romance between Jamal and a sultry captive beauty (Freida Pinto) forced into prostitution. It keeps pulling at your sleeve like a needy child.
Despite the wobbly structure, Slumdog is a far more sophisticated film than the plot suggests. There isn’t an inch of Merchant Ivory on view. And, like the best parables, Slumdog doesn’t simply plunder India’s troubled past and a boy’s bitter-sweet memories in order to look forward.
What’s great about the film is that it looks sideways as the past and future grind past each other like tectonic plates. It’s the kind of dynamic that Robert Lepage explores so brilliantly on stage. Here, Boyle takes on a bewildering mess of contradictions to make a surprisingly pure point.
Mumbai’s brand new skyscrapers sprout out of patches of mud; Jamal’s old-fashioned principles will forever be out of synch with the slick, nightclub world that his older brother Salim inhabits. And so it goes. The romance? Fear not. It’s fabulous icing