Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle's new film based on a rags-to-riches tale of an Indian slum boy, has already become one of the hits of the year. The BBC's Soutik Biswas wonders whether it is really the "masterpiece" it is made out to be.

Like his protagonist, a gutsy 18-year-old slum boy who is on the verge of winning 20 million rupees (about $400,000) in a popular TV quiz show, Danny Boyle has hit an unlikely jackpot with Slumdog Millionaire.

And much like Jamal, a child who nobody believes could get this far on the TV show without cheating, Boyle is being roasted by some critics for taking an easy shortcut and "using" poverty to serve up a we-are-poor-but-we-are-happy story.

After picking up four US Golden Globe awards and raking in nearly $50m at the box office in the US and Britain already, Slumdog, unquestionably, is the flavour of the season.

With its mixed cast, the much-feted and hyped film is also Boyle's paean to Mumbai (Bombay), India's edgy metropolis of extremes, and Bollywood, the world's most prolific film industry.

 

Everybody loves a good underdog. That is why Slumdog touches a chord

Some have called it a moving Dickensian take on Mumbai thanks to its portrayal of the city's stifling and colourful squalor and the people who live in it. Others have derisively called it poverty porn. One critic called Boyle's work "slum chic".

Well, yes, in the shadow of rubbish mountains, mothers get hacked to death in front of their children in religious rioting and a movie star-struck slum boy defecating under the open sky falls into a slush of excreta. Children get their eyes burnt with acid, and girls are forced into brothels by rakish young men.

 

Slumdog is based in Mumbai's teeming slums

On the eve of the film's release in India, NGOs invite reporters to meet the "real slumdogs". "Off the back of Slumdog Millionaire," says one invitation in my inbox, "we can offer access to the slums of Delhi and interview opportunities with the real 'slumdogs' - children who live in absolute poverty every day."

Poverty, like a lot of things, is good business in a free market. But India is also exceedingly cruel to its poor and callous towards its children, and is one of the most unequal societies in the world.

I have no issues with Boyle's cheery depiction of the resilience of slum children and the sunny side of slum life: it is part of the unchanging popular oriental stereotype of poverty equals slums equals dirty, smiling children. Been there, seen that.

In fact, Indians appear to have come to terms with Western filmmakers' depiction of the country's crushing poverty.

I remember the sets - a vast slum, what else? - of Roland Joffe's multi-million dollar City of Joy, starring Patrick Swayze, being firebombed by arsonists in the city of Calcutta in the early 1990s. They charged him with selling poverty. Joffe had to pack up his bags, leave the city and finish the film at London's Pinewood studios.

My quibble with Slumdog Millionaire lies elsewhere. The film doesn't move me.

I suspect what Boyle tries to do is a Bollywood film - the dirt-poor lost brothers, unrequited love - with dollops of gritty realism. But at the end of it all, it is a pretty callow copy of a genre which only the Indians can make with the élan it deserves.

The realism skims the surface, and in spite of some decent performances, style dominates over substance. And the film does not grip me in the way, say, the story of the life in Rio de Janeiro's favelas in the 2002 Brazilian crime drama City of God did.

 

Boyle 'tries to do a Bollywood' film for the West

Slumdog is a fast-moving visual feast, thanks to some kinetic cinematography and nifty editing. It's kitschy, but again not kitschy enough, to stand up to Bollywood. A dance sequence at a railway station looks like an aerobics master class. The soundtrack is a noisy pastiche of rap, hip hop and funk Bollywood. AR Rahman fully deserves his Globe - if the film can deserve so many - but Slumdog is obviously not his greatest soundtrack.

 

Ignorance

Everybody loves a good underdog. That is why Slumdog strikes a chord with audiences in these depressing times. But a clever telling of the story cannot hide the banality of it.

Slumdog proves - like many films - that globalisation has largely failed to make cultures understand each other better. Because Indian cinema is synonymous with feckless Bollywood fare to many in the West, a vast body of critically acclaimed and often, popular, work which has consistently exposed India's underbelly with more ferocity and vigour than any foreign film is routinely ignored.

Remember Satyajit Ray, India's only Oscar-winning filmmaker - derided in his own country as a pedlar of poverty - and his early work based in famished Indian villages? Remember Ritwik Ghatak's gut-wrenching portrayals of the horrors of post-partition India in the shantytowns of Calcutta? More recently, a slew of bright, young Indian filmmakers have taken on themes which expose India's many mutinies and fault lines.

The lesson from Slumdog Millionaire is: the 'Bollywood' genre firmly belongs to India and no other, and nobody can do it better.

And if you are looking for gritty realism set in the badlands of Mumbai, order a DVD of a film called Satya by Ramgopal Verma. The 1998 feature on an immigrant who is sucked into Mumbai's colourful underworld makes Slumdog look like a slick, uplifting MTV docu-drama.