It was 1985. We were flying back from Belgium to Bangladesh and had to spend a night in Bombay in order to make our connecting flight the next day. We arrived after dark and were whisked off to a hotel that attempted to convey a sense of high establishment. But in fact, it was suffering from the high humidity in the air. Living in the tropics, carpeted floors were a luxury and it was here where I could see firsthand why. As we walked through the hallways towards our rooms, I witnessed how water dripped from the ceilings down on to the damp hallway carpets. And anything damp in this climate starts to rot. I’ve slept in far worse places since then, but at the time, I was glad we were only staying a single night.
We would return to the airport the very next morning. The sun was up and it was on our way there that I saw Bombay as it really was for the first time. Even though at that point, we had lived in Dhaka for two years, that short ride was sufficient to give me one of the worst culture shocks of my life. The amount of poverty I saw out on those streets was indescribable.

Slumdog Millionaire takes place in this very same city. Nowadays, it is called Mumbai. The story itself is told in an unconventional yet refreshing way. At first, I thought there really wasn’t a story but simply an account of what it was like growing up in the slums of Bombay. Sort of like watching a travel documentary of a place that otherwise would remain completely alien to us. The cinematography is wonderfully beautiful even though the scenes it depicts aren’t. We are shown the poverty and pollution inside the amazing network of a large slum city. It’s the Bombay I remember driving though as a child.
The film shifts gear half way through, and slowly but surely, an innocent love story starts to emerge between two of the slum dwellers. As they struggle to stay together, it’s the harsh reality of their situation that keeps getting in their way.
While this film reminds me a lot of another excellent movie: Cidade de Deus (City of God), it’s comes over as a more optimistic film despite the environment in which it takes place. Well worth seeing.

The Places We Live

Sticking to the same subject. Here is an interesting site that documents 16 people around the world talking about their homes inside these slum cities and their lives. Also in sort of the same vein are the photographs of Michael Wolf. While technically they’re not slums, he went out to photograph 100 people in their apartments in Honk Kong. The apartments are all pretty much the same, just small boxes. But each one is personalized telling us something about the lives of its inhabitants.

Another safety card. This time animated. It really gives you that shocking sense of emergency one might experience when you discover the plane you are in is about to fall out of the sky.

It can’t be easy creating a film based on a well known historic event. Especially if the audience already knows how it will all play out. For it to succeed therefore, it has to in a way focus less on the historical facts. Instead, it should offer us the story behind the events, even if that story may not be historically accurate. It may even be pure fiction. Case in point is the ‘Last King of Scotland’ were the rule of Idi Amin is seen through the eyes of Dr.Garrigan, a fictional character. The people we meet in this film are engaging. And even though some liberties have been taken to what actually happened, the story does give us a clear picture of how a popular and charismatic boxer turned into one of the world’s most feared dictators. Valkyrie in this sense takes a different approach and unfortunately doesn’t deliver.

As a matter of fact, I found the documentary ‘Stauffenberg, the true story’, which recalls the most famous assassination attempt on Hitler, to be a lot more interesting then the film itself. The film felt more like a remake of the documentary where the details have been replaced by cinematographically rich scenes. While the documentary did a good job of explaining the back story and the character behind Stauffenberg, Tom Cruises portrayal of him felt very cardboard like.  

Other than a few hollow words said here and there, the film doesn’t really bother explaining us why Stauffenburg would risk his life and that of his wife and three children to commit a potentially treasonous act. It tells us nothing of the respect he commanded amongst his men or the suffering he had to endure after he was crippled. It simply conveys the events as they happened and we just have to accept that. The film lacks depth.

This is in total contrast to for example ‘Der Untergang‘. Despite us already knowing what happened in the last days of Hitler’s rule, it succeeded by focuses on the characters and conveying the sense of claustrophobic despair the soldiers and staff underwent in the final days of the Third Reich.

If I had to name one positive thing about this film, then it was the secretary, a role played by the Dutch actress Halina Reijn. Even though her role was small and hardly had any lines in the film, her screen presence said more about their dire situation then all the  dialogs put together. It was one of the few characters one could actually care about.