MIDNIGHT’s CHILDREN (2012)

MIDNIGHT’s CHILDREN by Deepa Mehta

Cast: Satya Bhabha, Siddhartha Suryanarayan, Shriya Saran, Ronit Roy, Shahana Goswami, Shabana Azmi, Seema Biswas, Anupam Kher, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Soha Ali Khan, Rahul Bose, Neha Mahajan, Ranvir Shorey, Vinay Pathak, Rajat Kapoor and others. 

Unsure if this movie had a theatrical release in my country( when internationally released in 2012-13) but it certainly makes Mira Nair’s A Suitable Boy(2020) look like a classic. Mehta has failed in every aspect of this cinematic adaptation of a great novel. 

It is claimed that the writer Salman Rushdie was really proud of this adaptation, really? Why? It’s bizarre and disjointed, a complete cold blooded murder of cinematic liberty. Specially the second half that zooms like Rajdhani Express with no halts. 

While the novel dealt with human emotions, the dilemma of a young adult in post independent India, his tribulations, self discovery etc. Here it goes to another level, more like a desperate attempt to sabotage the written creativity, and this makes the talented Rushdie proud? Unimaginable. 

It’s a beautiful story about two boys born at the stroke of midnight at India’s independence, how destiny and fate play a lifelong game by exchanging their place at the nursing home, a wealthy Muslim child is exchanged with a poor Hindu child, years later their paths cross. Though it ‘read’ great in the book it ‘looks’ and ‘sounds’ like an amateurish high school play on screen. Mehta’s direction is bad, can’t believe she has earlier made such classic movies, just why was the hurry to blend a novel into a movie like this. Of the ensemble cast only Goswami and Biswas are lovely to watch, why we’re great artists like Azmi and Kher roped in to play roles that could’ve been assigned to needy junior artists? Only Mehta can answer that. 

And what’s with this fascination of stereotyping Indians and Pakistanis during independence and immediate post independent era as loud, over dramatic and pompous? Almost all supporting artists are shown yelling and not speaking, with caricaturist body movements, screaming in high pitch and speaking in stammering hinglish. The book didn’t stereotype, but the movie did. ⭐️