Coming to terms with India and Oz

Want to start a new country? Or put a fresh spin on an existing one? Well, after you’ve drafted a constitution and written the national anthem, there’s something else you may want to do: make a movie.

In the century or so since film was invented, movie making and nation building often have been parallel projects. Many countries have used film to boost morale, mobilize the masses or simply take stock of where the nation stands at a given point in time, such as the tart social comedies of Britain’s Ealing Studios, which helped war-wearied Brits keep stiff upper lips, and the grotesque Wagnerian pageantry of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda. And for an aspiring global power, what better way to announce your First World ambitions (other than building nuclear reactors) than to film a national epic?

Nation building and the shaping of national identities are prominent themes in two current, seemingly dissimilar films, Baz Luhrmann’s “Australia” and Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire.” Neither could be considered the product of a national film industry, in a traditional sense. (And it must be said that Boyle’s tricky balancing of love story, social satire and subtle magic-realism flourishes in “Slumdog Millionaire” reap bigger, better dividends than Luhrmann’s wildly bravura approach to “Australia.”) Yet both movies afford valuable new perspectives on how filmmaking and other forms of popular culture condition the way that nations see themselves and are seen by others.

(Warning: spoilers galore ahead.)

An epic pastiche

As its title brazenly announces, “Australia” is the more conventional national saga, at least at first glance. Sweeping in historical scope, lushly filmed and headlined by two A-list Australian-raised stars, Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, “Australia” meets all the checklist requirements for an epic love story played out against the backdrop of a nation in transformative upheaval (see “Gone With the Wind,” “Dr. Zhivago,” Zang Yimou’s “Red Sorghum,” etc.).

National epics -- movies, novels, plays, genre paintings -- often have been used by countries to scrutinize their obsessions and exorcise their demons or, alternately, to declare their jingoistic aims. “Australia,” which tracks from the late 1930s to the early 1940s, climaxes with the Japanese bombings of Darwin that helped bring Australia deeper into America’s midcentury sphere of influence. The movie also confronts the touchy issue of the treatment of Australia’s aboriginal population, personified by the character of the young “mixed-race” boy Nullah (Brandon Walters).

As with D.W. Griffith’s cockeyed-racist “Birth of a Nation,” the infinitely more enlightened “Australia” sticks its thumb into a sore spot in the national psyche. If you doubt the smoldering relevance of the aboriginal issue, consider that the Australian prime minister only last winter made a formal apology for the suffering inflicted by previous governments on indigenous people.

But it would be misleading to see “Australia” as a national epic in the classic mode. Rather, it’s a pastiche, filtered through Luhrmann’s personal fixation with movies themselves, especially classic Hollywood cinema of the 1930s and ‘40s. The cartoonish maps shown in the movie’s early frames, the ludicrous “kangaroo shoot” sequence and Kidman’s deliberately stylized over-emoting as the imperious English noblewoman Lady Sarah Ashley (in the film’s first stages) clue us in that we’re not supposed to take “Australia” too seriously as a history lesson, even a revisionist history lesson. The so-called Aussie Boom of the late 1970s and early ‘80s already supplied that with movies like “Gallipoli,” “Breaker Morant” and “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” which weighed the mixed blessings of the country’s British colonial heritage.

But if “Australia” takes history with a grain of salt, it takes movies, and the iconography of movie stars, very seriously indeed. Jackman’s chiseled face and physique are made to look as much like a national monument as Ayers Rock, while his tanned, squinting face evokes Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name. For about half of its very long running time, “Australia” is a horse opera, self-consciously patterned after classic Hollywood westerns such as Howard Hawks’ cattle-drive epic “Red River.”

And could there be any image more expressive of Luhrmann’s apparent belief that Hollywood magic has shaped his homeland as much as any battle or social policy than Kidman singing “Over the Rainbow” to an aboriginal child?

The ingeniousness of “Australia” comes from Luhrmann’s understanding that today it’s virtually impossible to make a national epic that doesn’t acknowledge the crucial role that movies themselves play in shaping national self-image. Unfortunately, the movie’s patina of jocular, highly self-conscious artifice clashes with its earnest depictions of aboriginal “walkabout” rituals, Darwin’s heroic defenders and the like. Ultimately, “Australia” steps from cleverness into kitsch.

Brecht via Dickens

“Slumdog Millionaire” takes a far more jaundiced view of how popular culture forms national image than does “Australia.” Set mainly in Mumbai (formerly called Bombay) in 2006, with flashbacks to the early 1990s, it’s the story of a poor young man, Jamal (played by Dev Patel), who serves tea at a call center and unexpectedly becomes a star player on India’s version of the TV game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.”

The story’s debt to Dickens has been duly noted by critics: the ironic, coincidence-laden rags-to-riches plot, the squalid images of the monster metropolis’ poverty and predatory criminals, and so on. One especially vicious bad guy, who recruits street children as beggars, sometimes maiming them so they’ll get more sympathy, is a kind of Fagin-cum-Freddy Krueger.

But the literary giant hovering over Danny Boyle’s kinetic film (based on Vikas Swarup’s book “Q & A”) isn’t Dickens so much as Bertolt Brecht. Like the Victorian London of Brecht’s brutal satiric masterpiece “Three-Penny Opera,” the Mumbai of “Slumdog Millionaire” is a place where every human relation has been reduced to an economic transaction. The quiz show, presided over by a smarmy, corrupt host, is construed as a dark mirror image of money-obsessed modern India. The cheesy questions that Jamal must answer are a kind of debased, Cliffs Notes (or tourist guide book) version of Indian history and culture.

Rather than the picture of an economically booming, pro-Western democracy that it promotes to foreign investors, India here is presented as a repressive quasi-police state, caught up in a frenzy of cowboy capitalism, crippled by poverty and class prejudice and manipulated by powerful criminal mafias.

Which isn’t to say that this defiantly good-natured film isn’t an absolute blast to watch, or that it gives short shrift to India’s charms or its people’s resilient humanity. Boyle shows us India’s many beauties, even if some of those beauties are toxic. He even gives us a few postcard shots of mist-shrouded mountains and the Taj Mahal -- the kind of romantic visions that floated through previous epics like “A Passage to India,” “Gandhi” and the multi-part British TV series “The Jewel in the Crown.”

For all their merits, those earlier productions, made for predominantly non-Indian audiences, reinforced a view of the country as an “exotic” export commodity. So too, to an extent, does “Slumdog.” Although Doyle, a Brit, doesn’t shrink from the city’s squalid side, he occasionally leaves aside crucial, uncomfortable information, for example in the scene of the anti-Muslim riot in which Jamal’s mother is killed. No explanation is given for the attack, an actual event that occurred in December 1992 and January 1993, following the demolition of a historic mosque, in which 900 people were killed.

The vast majority of Western viewers who see “Slumdog” may be unlikely to rush out of the theater and go rent “Pather Pachali.”(film) But perhaps some will be inspired to give that Indian classic -- or an Australian, Armenian or Nigerian one -- a first look.

Because, in their very different ways, with different degrees of success, both “Australia” and “Slumdog Millionaire” urge us to discard our preconceptions and take a fresh look at the countries they depict. “Australia” uses Hollywood magic to bushwhack through certain historical cliches about Down Under, trying to approach the baffling, monumental essence of the actual country. “Slumdog Millionaire” invites us to dispense with the crude, quiz-show caricature of Indian history to begin grappling with the contradictions of the sumptuous 5,000-year-old civilization that is the real Asian subcontinent.

--

reed.johnson@latimes.com