From Slumdog to abig cat that roars
The White Tiger (15) Verdict: Roaringly enjoyable adaptation ★★★★☆ Baby Done (15) Verdict: Pre-natal comedy ★★★☆☆
CONSIDER the calibre of films that have been adapted from Booker or Man Booker Prizewinning novels: Schindler’s List, The English Patient, The Remains Of The Day and Life Of Pi were all festooned with awards of their own, and two of them won Best Picture Oscars.
In truth, though, there have also been a few duds. I thought 2017’s The Sense Of An Ending, inspired by the Julian Barnes book, a terribly dreary affair.
With the new Netflix release The White Tiger, I’m happy to say, the list burns bright once more. Writer-director Ramin Bahrani, whose films Man Push Cart (2005) and Goodbye Solo (2008) were both low-budget treasures, has turned Aravind Adiga’s darkly funny debut novel about servitude, class, corruption and ambition in 21st- century India, anointed with the Man Booker back in 2008, into a terrifically enjoyable film.
It is just as well. The two men, Bahrani and Adiga, met 25 years ago as students at Columbia University and have been friends ever since. Indeed, it is Bahrani to whom Adiga’s book is dedicated. He has returned the compliment in the best possible way.
Early on, in Bangalore in 2010, we see the story’s scheming protagonist, Balram (Adarsh Gourav), composing an email to Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, who is about to visit India. He is a successful entrepreneur, he explains, and Bangalore is his country’s answer to Silicon Valley; not that they need aspire any more to emulate the U.S. ‘I think we can agree that America is so yesterday, India and China are so tomorrow,’ he says.
THEfilm then whisks us back a couple of years and, with extracts from his letter to Wen Jiabao forming a kind of rolling narration, just as in the novel, we learn how Balram rose out of rural poverty to confound India’s rigid caste system and make money.
There are powerful echoes of another Best Picture, last year’s Academy Award-winner Parasite, as he ingratiates himself into a rich Delhi household as a driver, conniving his way into becoming most favoured servant.
It appears he has landed on his feet. Balram’s new master, Ashok (Rajkummar Rao), and his American wife, Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jonas), are, by most standards and within their innate assumptions of superiority, kind and considerate. But following a night of misadventure, when Balram realises that he is still entirely expendable and society is rigged against him, he begins to plot a fiendish way of exploiting India’s new opportunities, by using the family’s corruption against them.
Comparisons will doubtless be made with yet another Best Picture, also a story of Indian rags to riches, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008), at which the script makes a sly dig.
But this is a cleverer, more complex and more disturbing tale, shining a dazzling, unforgiving light into all the dark nooks and crannies of the master- servant relationship. ‘Do we loathe our masters behind a façade of love . . . or love them behind a façade of loathing?’ muses Balram.
It’s extremely well done. Also, as a beguiling bonus, The White Tiger shows life running parallel with art. Gourav, a hugely engaging lead, was a virtual unknown before being so astutely cast, while Chopra Jonas, a former Miss World, is a Bollywood superstar. She is excellent, too, but the movie belongs to him.
THE New Zealand-set comedy Baby Done tackles a different kind of lifestyle change, as Zoe (Rose Matafeo) contemplates her pregnancy with dread at what might become of her. ‘I want to have a baby, I just don’t want to turn into a mum,’ she says.
The film’s curious title, incidentally, is lifted from the notional list of life achievements to be ticked off, to which Zoe mockingly refers: ‘Married, house, baby . . . done.’
Zoe is a professional arborist, a born adventurer whose response to the idea that her life will be compromised by her growing bump is to get even more adventurous. She wants to bungeejump, she wants to fly to Canada to enter the world tree-climbing championships, and is aghast to find she can’t. Effectively, she has pre-natal depression.
In the meantime, in a subversion of the usual gender stereotypes, her English boyfriend, Tim (Matthew Lewis), is overwhelmed by ‘nesting’ instincts.
Directed by Curtis Vowell, written by Sophie Henderson and produced by Taika Waititi, Baby Done is likeable enough.
I watched with a smile which once or twice erupted into a fullblown laugh, and up-and-coming Matafeo is a ringer in every way for the young Maya Rudolph, which can’t be a bad thing.
At times it’s a little obvious — the comedy strains and gurns a bit — but it’s warm-hearted, and at an hour and a half, doesn’t outstay its welcome.
The White Tiger is available on Netflix, and Baby Done on most digital platforms, including Amazon Prime Video and Curzon home Cinema, from today.