Slumdog Millionaire: The story of time

Today, I watched Slumdog Millionaire. I watched it on my PC on a newly-bought, cheapest (that I could find) Logitech speaker on my broken-but-recently-fixed Philips monitor. So there's no such thing as cinematic experience. But that doesn't mean that I don't enjoy the movie as a medium of expression.

There are many elements introduced in this movie, some old and some new. The one that interest me the most is the manipulation of "time".

Let's take a look at the plot of the movie:

- Introduction to characters - Jamal, Salim and Lathika.
The movie introduced Jamal first (the opening) and it deliberately confused the audience with the parallel play of two seemingly separate events, but share the same "character" of the situation. Here, it forced us to think that these two parallels are just (1) Jamal's reality and (2) his imagination. But it's not. The two scenes that are interwoven are:

(1) an event in the police station where he was questions and tortured (homocide) and
(2) where he was sitting at the chair as a contestant in "Who wants to be a Millionaire", listening to Kapoor's question "Is this your final answer?" and some such things.

Here, we're forced to think that the event in the police station is an "imaginary" event i.e what's going on inside Jamal's head when answering the questions in the "Who wants to be a Millionaire".

This is the first twist - these two events mentioned above are two separate, real events. (you have to watch the movie all the way to the end to discover this. Otherwise, why should you spend 2 hrs on that, right?).

During the openings, Jamal went over a series of reflections on his childhood days. This thus introduced Salim, his elder brother as his "protector", and Lathika, his childhood lover.


Lost and Found - Search of Latika

Jamal, Salim, Lathika went around drifting away (their parents were killed in a religious clash) and was captured by a children exploiter (later revealed as Maman).

Jamal and Salim managed to escape , but on their way escaping, Salim decided that Lathika is better off in the hands of Maman. (why?). Jamal was mad at Salim.

They drifted around, but managed to make ends meet. After a while, Jamal urged Salim to rescue Lathika together.

OK, in search of Lathika, there are two stages:

First stage - Jamal and Salim went to Maman and rescue Lathika from Maman's headquarter. In this quest - Salim killed Maman (that's when Jamal rememberd and answer who invented revolver). Salim later took Lathika, and forced Jamal to leave. This is a hard blow for Jamal, who expected Salim's trust. After all, Lathika is Jamal's lover.

We're twisted again - Salim betrayed Jamal's trust.

Second stage - took Lathika from Salim. Salim apparently "gave" Lathika to Javed, another big time gangster in Mumbai.
Jamal pretend to be a cook/dishwasher, and ask Lathika to go with him out of Javed's house. Lathika refused.

Reversal of fortune - Jamal, who's a nobody and good for nothing, lost the only thing that he has - his lover Lathika.

Found Lathika, Salim's sacrifice and Jamal won the game

I don't want to elaborate this anymore. The plot is fairly typical in any Hindi movie where someone has to be shot dead to save another person.

If you ask me what's interesting about this movie, it's this - "time". As you can see, if I'm telling their stories, Jamal was actually at 3 places, relative to time:

(1) Sitting on the chair, on his way to win "who wants to be a Millionaire"
(2) At the police station, when was accused to be a cheater after his winning streak (they don't want the contestant to win the game, obviously).
(3) His life story - beginning from his childhood days, all the way to the time when he was sitting on the chair to win the game.

Typical Hollywood movie right? Not quite. The plot is typical, but the interplay of time is quite a character of this movie. It is the one that gave a powerful thrust, or rather - the most confusion to the audience. And the ultimate ending is does he win the game? (well, guess what, a hero has to win it. Otherwise, why should he be one?.)

The story was told in a back-and-forth manner (think of it as parallel processes), but converges at one event. It was a pretty interesting technique. This is a sort of "flashback" kind of movie, except that, the flashback was given a wonderful treatment in the sense that it has substance on the way the hero finishing his quest to become a millionaire to win back Lathika.

I've always amused at the concept of time. It could trick us in many ways.