Cultures Clash and Bond

Rating: 9/10 (25 January 2009)

Furiously alive, very brutal at times and unabashedly romantic, "Slumdog Millionaire" proves that a fairy tale can be very close to reality without losing all the elements that make it enchanting.
How real the India in this movie truly is lies in the eye of the beholder, but it certainly looks and feels like very few other movies about it and shows a country and a people on the move.
The most amazing thing about "Slumdog Millionaire" though seems to be, that a group of British filmmakers have penetrated the country with a Dickensian story and thus show that India and the former colonial superpower share one very crucial thing in common: The class and cast systems. Two civilizations who are so far apart have an age old social structure that still influences their lives today and even if East is East and West is West, "Slumdog Millionaire" unveils the connective tissue beneath.