Fantastic Insight

Rating: 9/10 (17 January 2009)

I absolutely love this film. From the first minutes to the last seconds, it was breathtakingly beautiful and heartbreaking all at the same time. Danny Boyle manages to capture the hectic chaos, noise, dirt, colour, vibrancy, dark and light of a Mumbai slum alongside the scenic beauty of modern India. Jamal's story is shadowed by poverty and the grimy underbelly of gangsters and guns from a very early age yet positivity always comes out from the path of unspeakably terrible things and you are left uplifted just as our protagonist is. Throughout his life, his love for Latika, the slum girl we see huddled in a puddle, shivering in a thunderstorm, brings him through whatever happens to him, and drives him to seek her out and draw them back together. The Millionaire premise is what opens and closes the film, like a bookend, the film is open and shut with the same feelings and thoughts. Happiness and love can push you through any despair. In watching this, the day to day despair you feel is infinitely superseded by the misery that Jamal and his companions have to got through, yet it is their youthful outlook to never let anything get them upset, that makes them so amazing and reminds you that as a Western world, we are incredibly self-centred and over-concerned with what is trivial, greedy for more and more when people with nothing have the ability to live each day content with the small things. The young Jamal, Salim and Latika's acting is outstandingly believable and it feels like you are an outside observer dropping in on their lives, rather than viewing a script. I cannot recommend you this film enough. The soundtrack gives me goosebumps and the trailer brings tears to my eyes. If you enjoyed City of God, you will love Slumdog Millionaire. A secret venture into the lives of people that we don't hear about enough, and that are so much more real than any of the other Hollywood blockbusters around. Truly worthy of an Academy Award. My only regret is that I didn't audition for this...