MIDNIGHT’s CHILDREN: Deepa Mehta’s adaptation of Salman Rushdie novel @ Toronto Festival

Oscar-nominated Indian-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta’s long-awaited adaptation of Sir Salman Rushdie’s Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight’s Children has evoked mixed critical reactions at the ongoing 37th Toronto International Film Festival. (Source: persianrealm.com)

The Film deemed too controversial may not be screened in India (See Related News)

Midnight’s Children (2012) directed by Deepa Mehta starringRonit Roy and Shahana Goswami, Satya Bhabha

Official Trailer:

Promotional Trailer:

Plot:

A pair of children born within moments of India gaining independence from England grow up in the country that is nothing like their parent’s generation

Director Deepa Mehta’s Biography :

Deepa Mehta was born in Amritsar, India and studied philosophy at the University of New Delhi before immigrating to Canada. Her first feature film Sam and Me (91) premiered at Cannes. Her other films include Camilla (94), Fire (96), Earth (98),Bollywood/Hollywood (02), The Republic of Love (03), Water(05), Let’s Talk About It (06) and Midnight’s Children (12).

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BBC’s IN THEIR OWN WORDS

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Salman Rushdie – Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses – BBC In Their Own Words :

Extract from the BBC documentary In Their Own Words in which they go over the history of British Novel from the voice of the authors.

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MIDNIGHT’s CHILDREN @ TIFF

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TIFF Presentation :

Spanning decades and generations, celebrated Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta’s highly anticipated adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Booker Prize®–winning novel is an engrossing allegorical fantasy in which children born on the cusp of India’s independence from Britain are endowed with strange, magical abilities.

Director Deepa Mehta @ TIFF:

Director Deepa Mehta sat down with Richard Crouse to talk about his new film Midnight’s Children. The film is a story about a pair of children born within moments of India gaining independence from England growing up in a country that is nothing like their parent’s generation.Distributed by OneLoad.com

Director Deepa Mehta @ TIFF:

Fri, Sep 7: Director Deepa Mehta sits down with Global News to talk about her new film “Midnight’s Children”, working with the Salman Rushdie, and the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

Salman Rushdie author of Midnight’s Children at the Toronto Film Festival 2012:

The Author of Midnight’s Children sat down with Red Carpet Diary to talk about the film adaptation of his novel. It’s about a pair of children born within moments of India gaining independence from England growing up in a country that is nothing like their parent’s generation.Distributed by OneLoad.com

Stars Siddharth and Shiriya of Midnight’s Children at TIFF 2012:

Siddharth and Shiriya sat down with Red Carpet Diary to talk about their new film Midnight’s Children. The film is a story about a pair of children born within moments of India gaining independence from England growing up in a country that is nothing likeDistributed by OneLoad.com

Satya Bhabha star of Midnight’s Children at the Toronto Film Festival 2012:

Satya Bhabha sat down with Joan Kelley to talk about his new film Midnight’s Children. The film is a story about a pair of children born within moments of India gaining independence from England growing up in a country that is nothing like their parent’s generation.Distributed by OneLoad.com

Programmer’s Note:

A momentous collaboration between Academy Award®–nominated director Deepa Mehta, one of Canada’s most gifted and fearless filmmakers, and Salman Rushdie, one of the world’s most imaginative, controversial novelists, Midnight’s Childrenmarks a milestone in international cinema. It is also a luxurious feast of a film, bursting with colour, wit, and magic.

Rushdie’s inspired adaptation of his own Booker Prize–winning magical realist novel follows the destinies of a pair of children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment that India claimed its independence from Great Britain — a coinci-dence of profound consequence for both. “Handcuffed to history,” and switched at birth by a nurse in a Bombay hospital, Saleem Sinai (Satya Bhabha), the son of a poor single mother, and Shiva (Siddharth), scion of a wealthy family, are condemned to live out the fate intended for the other. Imbued with mysterious telepathic powers, their lives become strangely intertwined and inextricably linked to their country’s careening journey through the tumultuous twentieth century.

An irreverent epic of Shakespearean proportions, shot through with moments of arresting intimacy, Midnight’s Children is a production of truly impressive scope: featuring sixty-two locations, state-of-the-art computer graphics, impressive production design by the director’s brother Dilip Mehta, and an enormous cast and crew, it was filmed under a cloak of secrecy in Sri Lanka, which turned out to be the best possible place to recreate the India of the past century. Brimming with romance, spectacle and intrigue, sly social commentary and uplifting optimism, Midnight’s Children is as vast and beguiling as the great country to which it pays homage. (More Here)

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MIXED RESPONSE

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Midnight’s Children evokes mixed responses in Toronto by Saibal Chatterjee (bbc)

The response of the general public at the Roy Thomson Hall in central Toronto was enthusiastic.

The festival, which runs until 16 September, hosted a gala presentation of the two-and-a-half-hour film earlier this month.

“The standing ovation was truly encouraging. It seemed to go on forever,” actor Ronit Roy, who plays protagonist Saleem’s father Ahmed Sinai in the film, told this correspondent after the screening.

North American critics, however, were less than impressed.

Toronto’s The Globe and Mail wrote: “Thanks to Rushdie’s own screenplay, and Deepa Mehta’s direction, Midnight’s Children is now a film – it’s just not an especially good film.”

The daily’s reviewer said: “Competent, yes, featuring a vast and solid cast along with multiple locations and abundant plot. But that’s part of the problem. With the book’s wryly witty tone mostly gone, all that’s left is plot – diminished yet recitative, like episodic milestones duly checked off on a laboured journey.”

‘Too reverential’

The Globe and Mail concluded: “There’s scant flow and consequently, from us, scant engagement. We look at the unfolding spectacle with our eyes wide but our emotions closed – so much to see, so little to feel.”

Midnight’s Children had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival before arriving in Toronto, Mehta’s hometown.

The Hollywood Reporter too gave the film an average review.

“Nothing less than an epic, panoramic look at the history of India and Pakistan over a 50-year period, the film is ambitious and often sumptuous to watch but not always dramatically satisfying,” it said.

“Perhaps one problem is that the film is too reverential toward its literary source, struggling to incorporate most of Rushdie’s teeming subplots. The result is that it becomes too difficult to find a narrative focus,” it added.

Midnight’s Children is indeed a sprawling and often quite engaging cinematic rendition of the 600-page novel – never an easy task even if the author himself has scripted the screenplay.

Sir Salman is also the film’s off-screen narrator, a role in which he does a remarkably good job, adding a layer of wit and insight that holds Midnight’s Children together for the most part.

The picaresque tale of two boys who are born at the precise moment that India shrugged off the British yoke in 1947 and are, therefore, “handcuffed to history” and to each other’s fate has been condensed to fit the film’s running time.

The acting is uniformly good, a fact that helps Midnight’s Children paper over some of the inevitable creases caused by the need for narrative ellipsis to capture the sweep and spectrum of the written text.

The huge cast of Midnight’s Children includes Shabana Azmi, Anupam Kher, Seema Biswas, Rahul Bose, Charles Dance, Shriya Saran and Shahana Goswami, besides newcomer Satya Bhabha as Saleem Sinai and southern Indian star Siddharth as Shiva.

‘Right actors’

At a moderated conversation between Mehta and Sir Salman in the previous edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, the two key figures behind the film revealed that they had originally approached A-list Bollywood stars for the key roles.

They abandoned the plan when the demands, monetary and otherwise, of the Mumbai actors went from the ridiculous to the bizarre.

“It didn’t work out, so we opted to cast actors that were right rather than those that were big,” Mehta said last year.

Midnight’s Children has yet to find a distributor in the country that it is about, so the film’s public relations machinery kept the Indian press at bay during the promotional activities in Toronto.

The film has the backing of Telefilm Canada and will be released in this country by Hussain Amarshi’s Mongrel Media, which was the key backer of Mehta’s controversial 2005 film, Water.

Water was originally planned to be shot in India in 2000 but both the location and the time of production had to be altered after Hindu hardliners disrupted the shoot in Varanasi.

The film was eventually filmed in Sri Lanka.

Midnight’s Children, too, was shot in Sri Lanka. “I did not want any controversy,” Mehta told reporters.

But reports suggest that the shoot was not entirely smooth.

The foreign minister of Iran appealed to Sri Lanka not to allow an adaptation of Sir Salman’s novel and permission was withdrawn.

Fortunately, the ban lasted only three days and filming went ahead without any further incident.

The film’s Rushdie connection and the barely disguised potshots that it takes at former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi will make it difficult for it to get past India’s current political dispensation as well as its right-wing forces.

It is unlikely that Midnight’s Children will open in India anytime soon.

MIDNIGHT’s CHILDREN: Deepa Mehta’s adaptation of Salman Rushdie novel @ Toronto Festival

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