Directed by Danny Boyle (with a codirecting nod to Loveleen Tandan), Slumdog Millionaire careens with hyperkinetic energy - but the whooshing cameras and crazy jump-cuts, the flashbacks and flash-forwards, the thumping rhythms of the soundtrack, aren't mere show. They're in service of the narrative, and reflective of its setting: a country teeming with crowds, a noisy, mad, knockabout place, awash in color and contradiction.
Played by three actors - Ayush Mahesh Khedekar as the tiny, wide-eyed orphan, Tanay Hemant Chheda as a wily young teen, and Dev Patel as the stone-serious 18-year-old game show contestant - Jamal Malik is an unschooled, unwashed product of urban tumult.
How Jamil, a gofer who serves tea - a "chai wallah" - to the phone workers in a Mumbai call center, landed in the hot seat on the TV show watched by everyone, and hosted by the acerbic, unctuous and wee-bit-sinister Prem Kumar (Anil Kapoor), is literally the million-dollar question.
Make that the 20-million-rupee question.
Essentially, Jamil has done it for love: Latika (Freida Pinto, in the grown-up incarnation) is the girl he ran with in the back alleys and orphanages of his youth, getting into mischief along with his brother Salim. At a certain point in their childhood, Latika is torn away - she's the prize catch for a prostitution ring - and Jamil's left with Salim to survive in the squalor. All these years later, to be a contestant on a show the whole country stops to watch - well, maybe, just maybe, Latika will be watching, too.
