Ian On The Red Dot

Slumdog Millionaire is a really simple movie. No twists, no special effects. It is a simple, but not simplistic, love story told with solid pacing, great acting and some fine cinematography.

Boy meets girl, boy and girl go through shit, boy and girl fall in love, boy loses girl, boy tries to find girl, boy finds girl, boy loses girl again, boy and girl go through more shit, boy finally reunites with girl.

The beautiful thing about this film about love is that while it was in a way made for ‘western’ audiences, it still managed to stay faithful to one of the core principles that traditionally defined Hindi movies – no kissing and sex scenes between the romantic leads.

I thoroughly enjoyed the way the director teased us at the end of the movie when Jamal leaned in and kissed Latika on the cheeks. It would seem that the film would have ended with that shot and stayed true to convention, but the director allowed the film to go on, finally ending it with a shot of the romantic leads’ lips touching.

That was supposed to be the KISS. Yet it wasn’t the kind of kiss ‘western’ audiences are used to. It wasn’t some wet, slobbering kiss with tongues sword-fighting. In fact, it was really just the beginning of a kiss. The rest is left to our imagination.

Yet, not really.

Here is where simple brilliance was shown. The director combined the Hollywood and Bollywood way of expressing love on screen by interspersing a dance scene with the ending credits. So while the film had kind of ended with the shot of lips touching, the love story actually continued.

The dancing was love being expressed, love being made.

Some notes:
Richard Gere’s public kissing of a Bollywood actress sparked protests.

In truth, some Hindi movies do feature kissing, but there are very good commercial reasons not to do so.From here:

As you can see in the still from Raja Hindustani, sometimes the characters do. But it’s rare. The censor board is notoriously unpredictable; no one wants to risk getting Karisma and Aamir get personala rating that would scare away families. Also, Bollywood plays to a diverse range of people, from the illiterate and provincial to the worldly and urban. Ideas of morality differ widely from group to group. Why include a kiss when you can easily leave it out and avoid the risk of offending customers? Also, actresses don’t want to lose their conservative fans, nor do they want to endure salacious flak from journalists. So they’re not too keen on kissing on-screen, and many proudly trumpet their refusal to do it.