A Film Canon

Of all Danny Boyle's films, Slumdog Millionaire is perhaps the most eloquent vehicle for his auteurism, just because it's based on a fairly unpromising book and screenplay, which tells the story of Jamal (Dev Patel), a slumdog who works his way onto the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, for the sake of winning back his childhood sweetheart, Latika (Freida Pinto). The most promising element of this narrative is the fact that Jamal isn't attempting to win back Latika with a display of money, or intelligence, but simply with a display, a dissemination of himself onto so many screens that one is bound to find her - and Boyle takes this as the basis of his directorial signature, which identifies the game-show as a post-Bollywood genre, and attempts to visualise some convergence between the two, just as the narrative converges Jamal's slumdog childhood and his progress on the game. Most explicitly, Boyle reserves the most elaborate, recognisably cinematic movements for the game show's crane cameras, suffusing his depictions of the city slums with the digital, hand-held cinematography that's become his directorial signature. However, there are two new innovations here - firstly, the cinematography is more anarchic than it's ever been, with the screen tilted for the majority of the film, and a hyper-kinetic frenzy that recalls nothing so much as Michael Mann shooting India, Mumbai Vice; and, secondly, there's a preoccupation with a space in front of the action, a kind of interface between the film and the audience that's variously figured as the space where subtitles occur, which tend to be positioned all over the screen, rather than at the bottom, the space where the questions on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? are positioned for the benefit of the home audience and, finally, the whole world of blurred, glassy objects that continually occlude the action, coming between the viewer and whatever they're supposed to be watching. If the radically kinetic, body-hugging cinematography feels like nothing so much as a phone-image, an inadvertent series of shots from the iPhone cameras that were on the cusp of widespread visibility at the time the film was made, then this additional interface feels connected to Jamal's work at a call centre, and the general connections made between call centre and post-Bollywood spectacle. As phone-images, the film's images already feel second-hand, globalised, deterretorialized and recirculated, a vision of India as the centre of a world without a centre, of affect as just another ingredient in its communicative conduit. Not only does this prevent the film ever feeling too exotic, but - astonishingly - it allows Boyle to even adopt a kind of picaresque tone - Jamal's favourite novel is The Three Musketeers - that never feels twee or contrived, and whose heightened sentimentality is simply that of the Bollywood industry itself, here condensed to the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? host's (Ani Kapoor) revelation that he desperately doesn't want Jamal to win. It's a vision of a nation of screens, in which picaresque playfulness consists in knowing how to dodge, elude and exploit your own co-option as spectacle, most memorably in Jamal's post-musical riff on Indian paintings to a credulous American couple.