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I so rarely get the chance to write this: here's a film that reminds me of Max Bygraves's 1970s chart classic, The Deck of Cards. This heartwarming monologue (originally recorded in the 40s) narrates the story of a humble soldier, hauled out of a church parade by a furious sergeant for playing cards.
Before his disgusted commanding officer can send him to the glasshouse, this poor semi-literate squaddie explains that for him, the deck of cards is his Bible: the Ace is the one true God, the two is the Two Testaments, the three the Holy Trinity - and so on until the gruff CO, like Bygraves's entire listening public, is reduced to a quivering tearful jelly at this simple soldier's dignity and piety.
Something very similar happens in this wildly silly but perfectly watchable melodrama, adapted by screenwriter Simon Beaufoy from the 2005 novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup and directed by Danny Boyle. Despite being overpraised - it arrives garlanded with the kind of reviews that must have come out after the opening night of King Lear - this is still very effective entertainment.
The movie is about the Indian version of the hit TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Dev Patel plays Jamal Malik, a former Mumbai street-kid who has a job making tea at a call centre. He astonishes all of India by entering the show as a contestant and triumphantly getting question after question right. Is he a fraud? A savant genius? Or is something weird going on?
His amazing winning streak means he has to come back the next evening for the final big-money question and overnight he is brutally interrogated by Mumbai cops convinced he is a cheat. They take him through each of the questions he got right, and Jamal's life story unfolds in flashback as our hero reveals that each question, like each of Max Bygraves's cards, has a special significance. His tale involves crime, drama, knockabout comedy and romance. Various characters determine his fate: his gangster brother Salim (Madhur Mittal), the love of his life Latika (Freida Pinto) and Prem (Anil Kapoor), the creepy - quizmaster himself, who has his own interest in Jamal's staggering success.
This movie has interesting antecedents. Patrice Leconte's 2006 film My Best Friend, starring Daniel Auteuil, features a nailbiting edition of the French version of Millionaire. Leconte's film, like Boyle's, culminates with a 'phone a friend' showstopper and both cheekily suggest the show is transmitted live, when, in real life, it is of course recorded and edited well in advance, at least partly to weed out the cheats.
I have some knowledge of all this, incidentally. I was once the 'friend' telephoned by a contestant on the show but at the crucial moment, my mobile phone was, shamingly, out of range. The quizmaster's face was reportedly a picture of polite bemusement as my voicemail message echoed pointlessly around the studio, before being smartly cut off and the contestant was permitted to phone another 'friend'. Naturally, hiccups like that don't make it on to air.
In this film, poor Jamal is, simply on suspicion of wrongdoing, beaten to a pulp by the police and horribly tortured with electrodes - the nastiest interrogation scene I've watched for a while. But afterwards he makes it into the studio as fresh as a daisy. Despite the extravagant drama and some demonstrations of the savagery meted out to India's street children, this is a cheerfully undemanding and unreflective film with a vision of India that, if not touristy exactly, is certainly an outsider's view; it depends for its full enjoyment on not being taken too seriously.
Interestingly, the co-creator of Millionaire, Steven Knight, is himself a screenwriter who has scripted far more serious films than this: Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things and David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises. Slumdog Millionaire really is gentle compared with, say, Robert Redford's satire Quiz Show and softcore compared with Danny Boyle's famous movies, Trainspotting and Shallow Grave. In fact, it's more of a kids' yarn, like his wacky caper Millions.
Well, for all this, it's got punch and narrative pizzazz: a strong, clear, instantly graspable storyline that doesn't encumber itself with character complexity, and the cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle is tremendous. It's definitely got that quirky-underdog twinkle and the silverware glint of awards can't be far away.
Slumdog Millionaire opens on screens in Seef, Saar, Al Jazeera and Awal tomorrow
