'Slumdog Millionaire is a cheap film'

Agencies

Director Priyadarshan has vehemently slammed Slumdog Millionaire by saying that it was a cheap version of a commercial Bollywood flick.

He said the film deliberately portrays the filthy side of Mumbai, without even showing the aesthetic side of the film city. " I am surprised that Mumbai is celebrating a film that shows only the city's underbelly," Priyadarshan lamented.

Indians are exercising prideful property rights over a film that denigrates Mumbai, he said. "If such cheap film would have been made by an Indian, he would have been blasted for good," the noted film director rued.

He also lambasted the Golden Globe and Oscars committees for choosing to honor the film. "It goes to show their ignorance of world cinema," Priyadarshan said.

Priyadarshan, whose much-acclaimed film on the silk weavers of Kanjeevaram was shown alongside Boyle's film at the Toronto Film Festival last year, feels Indians are exercising prideful property rights over a film that denigrates Mumbai.

"I saw the film with a mixed audience at the Toronto Film Festival. The Westerners loved it. All the Indian hated it. The West loves to see us as a wasteland, filled with horror stories of exploitation and degradation. But is that all there's to our beautiful city of Mumbai?"

"Why are we taking this treatment? Just because a white man has made 'Slumdog Millionaire', we're so happy with it? I've read Vikas Swarup's novel 'Q&A'. It should have been made by Mani Ratnam. Then you'd have seen what he would have done with Mumbai."

The angry director wonders why there isn't a single shot in 'Slumdog...' that shows the more aesthetic side of Mumbai?

"Why has Danny Boyle not taken one shot of Marine Drive? Do his slumdwellers exist only within their slums? And look at the absurdities...A boy becomes a national hero on a game show. One cop takes him under arrest and interrogates him relentlessly. Where is everyone else? Is this kind of confinement possible in this day and age when television cameras enter your bedroom? If one of our filmmakers had made the same film we would have blasted him out of business."

"Let them give as many Oscars as they like. We don't need to be impressed," ends Priydarshan angrily.