Fireworks. Newborn children and a new India burst to life. Each brims with optimism, each so unaware of the tangled threads their lives will sew, entwined at the very moment of their coming-into-being, knotted from the very start of their charmed and fated existence.
Saleem and Shiva, alongside other children to whom they will remain ever connected, burst forth into the uncertainty and excitement of an India on the midnight verge of independence. And yet, the naïve act of one scared midwife will alter the course of their lives forever, as one boy’s destiny is exchanged for that of the other.
Salman Rushdie’s acclaimed novel MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN has been brought to the silver screen by Deepa Mehta, working closely with Rushdie who makes his screenwriting debut here. Visually it is colourful and exotic; emotionally it is touching and hypnotic. The acting is without fault. The political situation of India’s raw and recent past is rendered in a manner capturing the sentiments and attitudes of an uncertain people on the cusp of a new world, so different from the one their parents knew.
… audio-visual blurring and childish ‘abracadabra’ wonder attempt a whimsy which eludes them …
Yet it is when the film’s humanistic narrative and political intrigue fade into light-ringed inner voices and space-confounding meetings that the magic fades into cliché and loses its charm. Carried away by the dramatics of overwrought mysticism, the magic touches of Rushdie’s prize-winning story which so captured the imaginations of a generation seem here unnecessary and incoherent, unbelievable and insincere. Devices of audio-visual blurring and childish ‘abracadabra’ wonder attempt a whimsy which eludes them, and in their self-conscious lightness they rob the protagonists’ political and emotional journeys of their weight.
Perhaps it is my own inherent aversion to anything of the mystico-magical genre, or perhaps it is because in this case the attempt to combine the serious and the whimsical simply does not work. Neither aspect gets the attention it deserves and the combination of the two results only in confusion and incredulousness, rather than solidarity and the strength of innovative relations. What promised, like the atmosphere it describes, to be fantastic and deeply affecting unfortunately falls short, just like the lives of those children of midnight on whom expectation weighed so heavy that they could not but stumble and tragically fall.
Reviewed thanks to the kind co-operation of the Phoenix Picturehouse, Oxford.
httpvh://youtu.be/IXgx6C8PHd4