Midnight's Children

When people like Salman Rushdie and Deepa Mehta collaborate, and the product is still allowed to be presented to the public, that itself is a miracle.

Both have a controversial past, and Midnight's Children was perhaps one chance for the general public to witness the brilliance of both.Strictly for Festival circuits, this movie is more of a showcase of the creator's mastery over their individual mediums than a coherent script with a satisfactory ending. Explaining the plot is something beyond my expertise, and so I will stick to the other nitty gritties.

Visually, MC is a treat to the senses - with subdued colors and elegant sets. The keyword is 'elegance' here, and not Sanjay Bhansali's 'extravagance': so you get to see the opulence of pre-Independence Kashmir and subsequently the slums of the 1990s. Nothing is over the top speaking of the ambience - the exaggerations have been reserved for the script alone, and thus you have iconic scenes like that of demonic Shiva (Siddharth) towering over the slums still saddling his motorcycle.

Getting the who's who of the Indian film industry to act in bit roles was a casting coup as well - so we have Shabana Azmi and Rajat Kapoor playing an unlikely couple where the wife wishes to rein in her daughters while the husband easily relents. Perhaps the Writer and Director have drawn inferences from their own symbiotic relationship while developing the film, as the cinematic medium does not offer as much laxity as available in print.

Midnight's Children is a film which provokes the mind- to draw analogies and to identify symbols. It is one which demands time and respect, and not a two-dimensional review.

There have been quite a few film adaptations of great novels of late. They were mostly deemed unfilmable and the one that turned out great was Life of Pi. Midnight's Children deserves a great film. Anything less is, well, not great. Deepa Mehta's film version is a misfire. The story, of course, is phenomenal. Whenever the film works it is because of the source material. There is beauty in Rushdie's verses which can only be decorated by celluloid. Instead, the beauty is squeezed out in spurts and the extraction process rids the film of its grand potential. This novel needs expansion on screen. A 500-page novel needs expansion? It could only need trimming you would think. No, the expansion I'm talking about is one of imagination.

The screenplay is adapted by Salman Rushdie himself. I don't know how much I could blame our Mario Puzo here but I believe the failure resides in only one person's hands - Deepa Mehta. Apart from the fact that I think Mehta is barely talented as a storyteller, she has managed to make her mark by feeding off of controversies. Not to mention they mostly please only one section of the niche audience of India filmgoers. Midnight's Children is tonally disjointed and ultimately a colossal failure. Not only does it fail as an adaptation but primarily as a film. Especially when the story takes fantastical turn. There is neither magic nor realism to be found here.

Some segments work well in the film. The rich/ poor divide, the Emergency sequence to name a few. But do they dazzle? Not really. It is mostly full of bad scenes. There is a voice-over where Rushdie sometimes reads his words verbatim to retain the “essence” of the novel. There is no point in retaining the essence if the scenes aren't constructed with attention to cinematic credence. This is not just seen in the scenes which involve fantastical sweep. I did not expect the children of midnight to become Hollywood superheroes. I'm talking about scenes that involve people talking. You don't feel a part of the story. There are also hideous moments like a brief montage which shows the final moments of three characters in succession. This is nothing else except bad filmmaking.

A good cast is assembled but they are no Avengers. The casting decisions are dull and uninspired. I was impressed with Siddharth, Shahana Goswami, Kulbhushan Khuarbanda and Seema Biswas but the rest of the actors add nothing to the film. Anupam Kher, Shabana Azmi and Soha Ali Khan show promise but are wasted. Ronit Roy and Darsheel Safary seem to have walked off from the sets of Udaan (2010) and Taare Zameen Par (2007). Rajat Kapoor and Rahul Bose can make even any film suffer with their presence, they make acting look bad.

The biggest casting blunder is that of our protagonist - Saleem Sinai who is awkwardly played by Satya Bhabha. Not that he is a bad actor but in this film he is just plain wrong. He doesn't make the character relatable, forget likable. From playing an evil-ex-boyfriend in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010) this actor had a role of a lifetime. Probably under a better director, he could have done justice to the role. For me, Midnight's Children is a failure of an epic.

A commendable adaptation, one that does full justice to the rather complex literature of Rushdie, Midnight's Children is a sweepingly shot epic that presents startling ideas with an inherent sensitivity.

Swapped at birth due to a misguided attempt by a conflicted nurse, a street-singer's son (Saleem) finds himself in a priviliged household, while the one destined for the riches (Shiva) suffers an impoverished upbringing which makes him an unresonably domineering and a bitter person.

These two lives are parallelled with crucial political events of the country - one particular is that of the Emergency where the entire country literally plunges into total darkness.

Along with the technical fineese, Mehta very well adapts to Rushdies's much debated use of magic-realism and comes out with exceptional resuts.

On a finer level, Midnight's Children is also a lot about unfulfilled aspirations, the necessity of love, and the lack of it, and also about troubled father-son relationships. Oddly, it fits well with the political uncertainity of a nation freshly out of colonialism, and the prompt loss of nationalistic idealism post-independence.

It is very hard to specifically define what gives so much soul to the narrative. Is it the voiceover narration by the novel's author that lends it a greater degree of passion, or the evocative performances which reflect hopes, dreams, melancholia, search for identity with equal abuncance ? Perhaps it is the collective force - both the enactments and the over-verbose narration which is punctuated with a soulful soundtrack.

In particular, Shahana Goswami is absolutely phenomenal in her part, while Rajat Kapoor is predictably brilliant, and so is Rahul Bose, Shabana Azmi and Ronit Roy. Darsheel Safary, again, portrays his part (that of a young Saleem), with great accuracy.

Overall, fans of Rushdie will be delighted while the ones who haven't followed his writing will appreciate the aesthetically inspiring film.

Film: Midnight's Children

Director: Deepa Mehta

Screenplay: Salman Rushdie

Cast: Satya Bhabha, Shriya Saran, Siddharth, Shabana Azmi, Rajat Kapoor,Rahul Bose, Shahana Goswami, Ronit Roy, Darsheel Safary, Soha Ali Khan, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Suresh Menon, Kulbhushan Kharbanda etc.

I remember having started reading the novel some time back, when the initial news of converting it into a film was announced. Sadly, i couldnt finish it. Regretted this fact until recently, when i saw Midnight's Children.

The story revolves around a boy born in Bombay at the stroke of Midnight, the exact moment when India got its independance. Salim Shinai(Satya Bhabha) gets exchanged at the hospital with another baby boy Shiv (Siddharth) belonging to a poorer family. This simple yet deliberate act was believed to have brought revolution and equality (rich becoming poor, poor becoming rich) in the post-independant Indian scenario. Sadly, it led to a topsy-turvy roller-coaster ride for Shinai and changed his life forever.

The film boasts of a huge starcast, all brilliant actors and some very well known faces. And each one has got into the skin of the characters. Shahana Goswami was perhaps the best amongst equals. With her trembling hands and subtle eye movements, she stole the show. Seema Biswas fits to the core of an endearing nanny/nurse. Shriya Saran and Soha Ali looks stunning in their own way. Veteran actors like Anupam Kher,Shabana Azmi and Kulbhushan Kharbanda were like meteors, dazzling the screen, even though their individual roles were short.

More than the story, its the beauty of the locations(Various parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh) and the portrayal of the characters that make the movie a treat to watch. Subtle moments like 'glass-kissing' and 'lizard slipping on the wall' to depict the partion are simply brilliant.

In short, Midnight's Children is poetry on screen. It needs to be experienced.