MOVIE REVIEW : A Child’s-Eye View of a Gritty World

The streets of Bombay are choked with children--runaways, castoffs, cripples--whose lives are lived at pavement level, with the stink of truck fumes and the din of traffic never out of their heads. They are pantomime artists, pickpockets, a flamboyant miniature circus; they will dance, sing, blow bubbles, slap your windshield with a dirty rag or deliver milky jars of tea, anything for a few paisa in the pockets of their outsize pants.

They sleep on cement cushioned only by cardboard or, like “Salaam Bombay’s!” tiny Insect, in a wrecked motorcycle sidecar, one eye cocked for the police vans that swoop down to take them to the institutionalized children’s homes the kids call “chiller rooms,” not without reason.

Their survival--more than that, the spirit with which they persist--is an ongoing wonder. An equal miracle is director Mira Nair’s assured and passionate film about them (at the Nuart), fiction with its roots in the bitter truth. It manages, in same way that “The 400 Blows” managed, to lift us beyond its pain to compassionate understanding of a troubling scene.

Nair has a wonderful eye and a truly cinematic sense of story. She doesn’t tell in words what the eye of her camera can say with more authenticity. (Her cinematographer is Sandi Sissel, whose control of lighting and composition may remind you of Maria Cosindas or of Mary Ellen Mark.)

But as a director, Nair must also have a fierce insistence on truth, because none of her film’s core of real street kids can ever be discovered “acting.” They range from early teen-agers down to the tiny 8-year-old (Hansa Vithal) who has the crucial role of Manju, the child of a brothel prostitute and her handsome, thuggish pimp, Baba (Nana Paketar).

We pick our way through this feverish world with the same curiosity as the film’s central figure, 10-year-old Krishna (11-year-old Shafiq Syed, a phenomenon). Abandoned when his traveling-circus employers move out abruptly, he has headed uncertainly for the first big city where he can earn 500 rupees, Bombay. It’s the price of a bicycle he has destroyed; the price, he hopes, of winning back his mother’s favor.

In the city, he’s green, a “bumpkin,” a mark for kids even half his age. But soon he’s swept into a little experienced clot with Chillum (Raghubir Yadav), a 25-year-old drug addict, at its center. Krishna gets a job working as a tea boy, he even loses his name to the nickname Chaipau, “one who gets tea and bread.”

The Kamathipura area’s brothel No. 109 is the film’s main setting. From there, Chillum sells Baba’s drugs, sampling them liberally himself. And after one glimpse of Sweet Sixteen (Chandra Sharma), a tear-stained, shanghaied innocent whose virginity will bring the brothel 10,000 rupees, Krishna/Chaipau haunts No. 109 too, mutely captivated. (“Salaam Bombay’s!” intensely cinematic quality is heightened when Sweet Sixteen and Chaipau must mime their feelings; she speaks only Nepali, he only Hindi. Somehow there is an echo of “Broken Blossoms.”

Like Chaipau, we are thrown into this precarious life with no explanation. But the film makers are canny. We identify so quickly with Chaipau that when, for example, Sweet Sixteen dashes the glass of tea he’s brought her on to the stone floor, we know her gesture will cost him money at the tea stall. Or when his customers complain that there’s too much water in the tea, it’s because the drenched boy has been making his rounds in the pouring rain. No sociologist made points more poignantly.

Bizarrely, even as we watch Chaipau’s life at close range, “Salaam Bombay!” hasn’t quite the bleak hopelessness of “Pixote.” It even has moments of outrageous sass, although they come at appalling points in the action. The movie’s liveliness also comes because the film vibrates with the mad, electric colors of India itself, from painted wood with a faded patina to the golds and silvers and prints of Manju’s gaudy dress-up clothes.

If the young actors are impressive, the film’s professional actors are their equals, in particular Manju’s tragic mother (Aneeta Kanwar), the voracious madam (Shaukat Azmi) and Yadav’s full-scale portrait of the irrational, despairing Chillum, caught in his spiraling drug habit. (The film is Times-rated Mature for its subject matter.)

Chaipau’s maturing--wising up is nearer the mark--is tragedy enough. Nair lets us watch the subtle changes in him, from the open-faced little boy in the country to the face of ravaged innocence at the close. (The last sequence is framed by a wild street festival for the elephant god Ganpati, which will inevitably bring back memories of “Children of Paradise.”) It is a luminously intelligent performance by Syed, making the question of his future all the more poignant.

“Salaam Bombay!” won Nair the Camera d’Or as best new director at Cannes this year. (Last weekend, it won first prize at Los Angeles’ Women in Film Festival.) Watching the strength of her vision and her craft, balanced by the empathy shown in all her work so far--her earlier documentaries as well--there is every reason to believe that “Salaam Bombay!” marks the opening of an extraordinary career.

‘SALAAM BOMBAY!’

A Cinecom Pictures Release. Producer, director Mira Nair. Screenplay Sooni Taraporevala from a story by Nair and Taraporevala. Co-producer Mitch Epstein. Camera Sandi Sissel. Editor Barry Alexander Brown. Production design Epstein. Art directors Nitish Roy, Nitin Desai. Sound Margie Crimmins. Director of Children’s Workshop Barry John. Music L. Subramaniam. Executive producers Anil Tejani, Michael Nozik, Gabriel Auer. Co-executive producer Cherie L. Fodgers. With Shafiq Syed, Sarfuddin Qurrassi, Raju Barnad, Raghubir Yadav, Nana Patekar, Hansa Vithal, Chandra Sharma, Shaukat Azmi.

Running time: 1 hour, 53 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature.