Review of Midnight's Children

Deepa Mehta, alluring 63 year old Canadian based Indian director has been married four times and is still going strong (at getting married). The 2012 edition of the Los Angeles festival of Indian Film closed shop on Sunday. April 14 with a brace of films on successive evenings by two of the best known Indian woman directors, Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta, both living outside of India. The films in question were respectively Nair's recent "Reluctant Fundamentalist" and Mehta's newly minted "Midnight's Children" based on Salman Rushdie's latest novel of the same name. The former is a treatise on Terrorism Paranoia leading to the unwitting (i.e.,"reluctant") creation of a terrorist in the wake of 9/11 hysteria, while the Mehta opus, shown here as a Sneak Preview, is a somewhat mystical tale of two boys, one from a rich family, the other from a poor one, born at midnight, on the very eve of Indian independence in August 1947, but consciously switched as an act of protest by a hospital nurse (Seema Biswas). Because this was a sneak preview full reviews are held in abeyance until the end of the month. For the moment what can be said is that the film rambles through the main events of Indian history since Partition with lots of metaphysical spin. Being a prestige film both from the point of view of director and writer the predominantly Indian audience viewed it with proper respect giving it a round of subdued applause that was more polite than appreciative at the end. Director Mehta introduced the film personally but did not stick around for a Q and A afterward. (PS: The film was a mishmosh that went nowhere -- a disappointment considering the expectations going in ...) Deepa Mehta is known for handling touchy subjects and the references in this film to Indira Gandhi, focusing on her suspension of democratic institutions during the State of Emergency (June '75 to March '77) were particularly objectionable to certain elements of India's majority Congress party. Ms. Mehta is best known for her Fire, Earth and Water trilogy all of which addressed controversial aspects of Indian society such as child marriage, prohibition of widow remarriage, and lesbianism, and were critically acclaimed world wide. The current film, however, can only be seen as a major letdown from a major Indian director. Hopefully this resourceful lady will soon have more cinematic ammunition in the folds of her colorful saris.