London Film Fest 2012 Day 6 - MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN

Salman Rushdie, Shriya Saran, Deepa Mehta and Staya Bhabha
at the UK premiere of MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN

Oh dear. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children is a wonderful book - vibrant, mysterious, magical, all-encompassing, particular.  There is a richness in the text and an elegance of phrase that not only won it the Booker Prize of that year, but also the Booker's Booker and the Best of Booker.  It is, then, judged by the English literary establishment to be the best novel published in the last 40 years.  To adapt such a novel might be assumed to be a daunting task, and although many were relieved to see that Rushdie himself had taken on that role, I suspect that it is one of the reasons this movie fails.  

For the movie feels almost too tame, too faithful to the key plot points of the book, and yet entirely missing its mischievous magic and political wisdom.  I suspect that a more independent screenwriter might have had more luck taking a fresh perspective. Maybe a director like Joe Wright with his bold (if ultimately over-powering) theatre-conceit for his recent ANNA KARENINA could've matched Rushdie's daring style.  Maybe Wes Anderson could've brought that sense of childhood magic to the film?  And we will shortly see if Ang Lee has better luck with his adaptation of the heavily magic realist, THE LIFE OF PI.  Instead, what we get with this adaptation is a lusciously filmed, rather stickily sentimental, aimless movie, that gets us from A to B, from the 1920s to the 1970s, with faltering energy, pace and interest. It is, sadly, a failure.

The movie tells the story of a boy called Saleem Sinai, born in 1947 on the stroke of midnight as India gains her independence.  He is raised as a prosperous Indian Muslim, but is sent to Pakistan, where he sees first hand the military coup and the war that saw Pakistan forfeit Bangladesh.  He returns to Mumbai a slum dweller, suffers through Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's Emergency, before finally creating a kind of family of misfits.  Such a plot makes the book sound much simpler than it really is, of course.  For Saleem is an imposter - a baby switched at birth with another "midnight's child" - a boy called Shiva who will grow to become a gangster and an Army officer - the dark backing of Saleem's life. Furthermore, all of the "midnight's children", born at India's independence have magical powers, but Saleem's are the greatest, because he can summon them all in a kind of mystical conference.

There are small delights in this film - the prologue which tells of how Saleem's grandparents met in Kashmir is beautifully told - thanks largely to a superb cameo performance from Rajat Kapoor.  Darsheel Safary was enchanting as the young Saleem, perplexed at his "father"'s sudden rejection and his cold upbringing by the hilarious Major Zulfikar (Rahul Bose).  But as Saleem becomes an adult the movie loses all its energy and pace.  I don't think that's the fault of the casting - just the rather 1066 And All That approach to the storytelling - history as a series of disjointed events whose meaning and context we don't really understand.  In other words, the tragedy of this film is that it has transformed a  history of India that was numinous and magical and rich and textured into something rather plodding and banal.

MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN  played Telluride, Toronto and London 2012 and opens in the USA and Canada on Oct 26th. The running time is 148 minutes.

WATER - the sad lot of Indian widows

WATER is a politically charged film exposing the cruel treatment of Indian widows in pre-independence India.

Director Deepa Mehta explores this alien world through the eyes of a young girl called Chuyia ("Mouse"). Married before puberty, Chuyia finds herself a widow and thus an outcast from society. Her family leave her in a religious house where these outcasts band together, praying for a happier reincarnation, whistfully remembering the years of feast, begging for money and, if young and beautiful, being pimped by a eunuch on behalf of the alpha widow. When Chuyia asks obvious questions - when do we stop praying? - where is the house for widowers? - the other widows anxiously quieten her. She is expected to accept her fate and the belief that merely by touching a married woman, she can pollute her.

As well as attacking the traditional treatment of widows, the movie attacks how high caste Indians treated the outcastes. In a striking scene, a Brahmin (upper class) man tells his son, Narayan - a liberal law student, follower of Gandhi, and the hero of the film - that a whore is blessed when a Brahmin sleeps with her. Therefore, he should feel no compunction in sleeping with the attractive young widow, Kalyani, and forget all this marriage nonsense. To marry a widow, whether whore or not, would be a sin.

WATER works best when following Chuyia's exploration of her newfound role in society. And for me, the real hero of the piece - in terms of an emotional and intellectual awakening - is the widow Shakuntala. Both are played by fine actresses - Chuyia by a young Sri Lankan girl and Shakuntala by Seema Biswas, famous for her role as Phoolan Devi in Bandit Queen. The love story between Kalyani and Narayan felt like a distraction, although presumably necessary to expose the hypocrisy of shunning the widows for being polluting in public but sleeping with them anyway in private. Lisa Ray is just okay as Kalyani - but then she is largely a cipher. But how pleasantly surprising to see Bollywood action hero, John Abraham, give a decent turn as Narayan!

Apart from the performances from Sarala and Seema Biswas, the key strengths of the film are its stunning and atmospheric cinematography and score. Its most obvious flaw is a melodramatic denouement which feels out of step with the mournful tone of the rest of the film. Is there enough here to merit an Oscar? I don't think so - at least not in the year of Volver, Tony Takitani, Pan's Labyrinth. I only hope that the movie has been nominated on merit rather than out of liberal solidarity. Famously, production in India was halted after protests by politicians still touchy about the criticisms of Indian society and the two leads had to be recast.

WATER played Toronto 2005 and was released in Canada in 2005. It opened in the US, France, Germany, Portugal, Italy, Belgium and Singapore in 2006. It is available on Region 1 DVD. I do not know of a UK release date. WATER has been nominated for Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.