Slumdog Millionaire
Just before the global recession, when the term BRICS was appearing in newspapers, Mumbai, India, was a symbol of the emerging nouveau riche city (alongside Dubai) (I wonder if that is still the case today).
The film 'Slumdog Millionaire' depicts the dizzying sprint of boys and girls called 'slumdogs' who grew up in the slums of Mumbai, crawling their way up from a world that is almost Neolithic, like 'Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,' to reach the middle class of a hyper-modern city in just ten years.
Perhaps this sense of speed is the reality of modern India. That is what brings an exceptional tension to the film.
An uneducated 18-year-old youth raised in the slums answers every question correctly on a quiz show that promises a huge cash prize. How is he able to answer correctly? It is a scenario as sharp as a Jack London short story, where the answer to each question is fused with the memories of pain etched into his mind and body.
However, if you ask if the tension of this quiz show is the climax of the drama, it is actually not. It is the opposite. The twist in this film is that while the 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire' show creates a stinging sense of urgency that captures all the TV viewers—where a correct answer brings a huge fortune and a wrong answer means losing everything—Jamal (Dev Patel) alone is completely unfazed by it.
Compared to the life-or-death 'tightrope walk' he has experienced in his real life so far, winning 20 million rupees on a quiz or losing it all is laughably carefree. He only appeared on the TV show that his beloved Latika watched without fail just to send her a signal that he wanted to see her again.
I thought this simple, high-purity love story could also be seen as a quiet critique of the immoderate upward mobility that has possessed modern India, the 'get rich quick from slum to mansion' mentality.
In the final credits of the film, a grand dance sequence reminiscent of 'Muthu' unfolds, and this brought me a deep sense of relief. The thing that absolutely clinched the Academy Award judges' conviction that 'this is the one' must have been that super-happy dance.