"The essence of the film," murmured A. R. Rahman, the best music winner of the Academy, "is about optimism and the power of hope in lives..."

 

True. Hope is the most gorgeous selling point of Slumdog, though it preaches that everything is written. Jamal bulleted into the waste pool for the sake of his firm hope. It is that hope which holds Jamal to keep tracking his girl, to rock the televison show, and to win his love in the end. Impossible is nothing; well, the nothing happens to happen on him. Rather than love, Slumdog tells a life story, especially during the era of global recession.

 

Sure, but why does the low budgetted film as Slumdog win? I was thinking about the question for dozens of minutes shortly after watching it. The Bollywood Dickens roman portrays another Occidental one thousand and a night in a modern version. India, the past and the present, is the set of brutal poverty and alien beauty. It recalls me of Crouching Tiger's success. However, the difference lies in the tension of modernization. More intense in the Slumdog. The music, again, appears folk but finger poping, quite at the the desire to release the tension from within and out of the audience. As Adorno critisized in Dialectic of Enlightenment, pop culture cultivates false needs, that is, created and satisfied by capitalism, the repressed need. Slumdog fits the call.

 

2008, it was a year of leanness. Slumdog wins. Thus I am hopeful.