A laboured journey for Midnight’s Children
Deepa Mehta’s film only confirms the impossibility of translating
into a visual format the magic realism central to Rushdie’s most
celebrated work
As Indian cinemagoers finally get to see Midnight’s Children, due
for general release on February 1, here’s some friendly advice: keep
expectations low — I mean really, really low — or else you are likely to
feel crushingly disappointed.
Although Salman Rushdie himself has written the screenplay, it is a
parody of his great novel. After the first half, enlivened by scenes of
levity such as Dr. Aadam Aziz examining Naseem limb by limb through a
hole in the purdah, it descends into chaos and boredom. The
weakest bits are those that deal with serious politics — the trauma of
Partition, the break-up of Pakistan, Indira Gandhi’s emergency and its
excesses, all of which lie at the heart of the book. The focus, instead,
is on its farcical elements.
It is cringing to see one of the most celebrated works of the 20th
century reduced to that tackiest of Bollywood clichés: babies switched
at birth setting off a chain of unintended consequences.
The novel’s most magical moment is when Saleem Sinai arrives into the
world exactly at the same time as independent India is being born and
thus becomes “handcuffed to history” for the rest of his life. In the
film, however, it comes through as a cheap gag: we see images of
hundreds of “midnight’s children” comically juxtaposed with exploding
fireworks to welcome India’s freedom from colonial rule. And then comes
the “Big Switch” instigated by a cardboard revolutionary with some oddly
reactionary ideas about how to achieve social justice.
You might say, but all that is in the book. Yes, and that’s the problem: Midnight’s Children is
unfilmable. A sprawling fantasy of epic proportions, hinged on an
abstract idea, it is a film-maker’s nightmare. The world’s best
directors — and without doubt Deepa Mehta is one of them — will struggle
to deal with the sheer sweep and ambition of Midnight’s Children with its surreal subplots and a jerky narrative.
Rushdie as screenplay writer
Mehta has admitted that compressing such a big book into a two-hour film
was hugely “challenging” and that she was keen for Rushdie to write the
screenplay precisely because she felt that he would be less
“intimidated by the process of elimination.” Rushdie himself has said it
was “heartbreaking,” over how much he had to leave out in the end. With
the stuffing taken out, we are left with a film that bears only a faint
resemblance to its source material.
“With the book’s wryly witty tone mostly gone, all that’s left is plot —
diminished yet recitative, like episodic milestones duly checked off on
a laboured journey. There’s scant flow and consequently, from us, scant
engagement. We look at the unfolding spectacle with our eyes wide but
our emotions closed — so much to see, so little to feel,” is how
Toronto’s The Globe and Mail described it when it was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival.
‘No focus’
An American critic wrote that it struggles “to incorporate most of
Rushdie’s teeming subplots” and fails to find “a narrative focus.”
In Britain, the reaction has been similarly lukewarm. It has been
variously described as “unfocused,” “meandering,” and “plodding” with
Rushdie’s screenplay flagged as the main problem.
“Salman Rushdie isn’t everyone’s idea of a literary genius. But if you
admired his Booker Prize-winning novel and find this film lacking, it
can only be largely the writer’s own fault since 60 years of history and
600 sprawling pages have been compressed by him into a little less than
two and a half hours on screen,” said the London Evening Standard.
Though comparatively more sympathetic, The Times also pointed out that “Rushdie’s screenplay tends to get bogged down in moments of narrative stagnation.”
A straw poll by me at a central London theatre where I saw it revealed
that those who had read the novel found the film too slight (``it jumps
from scene to scene,’’ said one) and those who hadn’t struggled to
understand what it was all about.
The truth is that Rushdie’s magic realism is not the stuff of cinema or
indeed theatre as we saw when the Royal Shakespeare Company staged it in
London in 2003. Academic and writer Germaine Greer famously likened it
to a tacky “costume drama.” The play was criticised for trying to
squeeze “huge narrative gallons into a pint pot.”
Rushdie was heavily involved with that production too. Wiser by
experience, he has tried to cut out the flab this time but has gone too
far in the opposite direction. All of which confirms the impossibility
of translating Midnight’s Children into a visual format — it becomes either too chaotic or too lean with all the meat gone.
The ultimate tragedy is that thanks to Rushdie’s persistence there is a
danger that his greatest achievement could end up being remembered only
as a bad play or a bad film rather than as a literary masterpiece.
Mr. Hasan Suroor at The Hindu
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