Slumdog Millionaire

Oscar watch: Slumdog Millionaire - a spoonful of sugar helps the horror go down

Danny Boyle's dazzling Oscar shoo-in is a masterpiece of manipulation and exploitation

A boost to Mumbai's slum tourist industry … Slumdog Millionaire

Next stop, the Oscars. Already weighed down by Golden Globes and Bafta masks, Slumdog Millionaire seems unstoppably destined to snare Best Picture on Sunday. It is written.

1. Slumdog Millionaire
2. Release: 2008
3. Country: UK
4. Cert (UK): 15
5. Runtime: 120 mins
6. Directors: Danny Boyle, Loveleen Tandan
7. Cast: Amil Kapoor, Anil Kapoor, Azharudin Mohammed Ismail, Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Irrfan Khan, Madhur Mittal, Rubina Ali
8. More on this film

Perhaps even more striking than the film's gong-gluttony has been its extraordinary run at the box office. Weekend after weekend it has trampled over the new releases on which Between the Lines normally concentrates, and set new records not just in the UK but across the world.

The triumph of last year's megaBritflick, Mamma Mia!, provoked much head-scratching about the secret of its success. So far, Slumdog seems to have attracted less analysis. Perhaps that's something to do with the aura of righteousness that surrounds it. It's almost as if its wonderfulness is so ineffable that to dissect it would be sacrilege.

The film clearly has plenty going for it. The panache of its cinematography, the brilliance of its central conceit and the charm of its young actors are beyond dispute. Yet they hardly seem sufficient to inspire such a huge and enthusiastic following.

Capable though the performers are, they have little to do. Apart from Anil Kapoor's delightfully oleaginous quizmaster, they're not much more than ciphers. The plot's absurd and, to be fair, it's meant to be. The point of the whole thing (chance rules? love endures? destiny prevails?) is either unclear or banal. Clearly, the film still manages to pack a knockout punch. But is this because it's being delivered below the belt?

Some have called Slumdog "poverty porn". Presumably, by this they mean that it exploits the horror on which it feeds to provide audiences with a degrading and illicit thrill. Director Danny Boyle might reasonably point out that plenty of his peers have opted to peddle privation. Must La Haine and City of God, he might ask, also go under the counter?

On-screen sex seems to be considered pornographic when its purpose is to arouse rather than enlighten. By this test, Slumdog doesn't come out too well. It certainly seems more intent on turning its source material into voyeuristic entertainment than on seriously exploring its complexities.

Perhaps that's why in India posters for the film have been torn down, pictures of Boyle have been burned and a cinema has been vandalised, while the other two films seem to have prompted no comparable protests in the Paris banlieue or Rio's favelas.

Whether it's poverty porn or not, Slumdog ruthlessly deploys manipulative sentimentality to bludgeon its audiences into submission. Perhaps that makes it a kind of emotional porn. It certainly flirts cheerily with the pornography of violence.

These days, much of the action in what are supposed to be violent films is balletic rather than shocking, so formulaic are the conventions to which it adheres. In Hollywood popcorn movies, you don't tend to see full-on torture, still less children having their eyes burned out with acid. For these things, you have to turn to "the feelgood film of the year".

Boyle gets away with all this because it comes coated in spray-on, right-on compassion. Without having to put themselves out, Slumdog's audiences are enabled to bask in a warm glow of moral superiority. That, too, somehow seems a little bit pornographic.

Not to worry. The film has boosted Mumbai's slum tourism industry, though apparently some of Dharavi's ungrateful denizens have taken to shouting abuse at the westerners coming to gawp at them. It's certainly boosted British cinema. "Slumderful!", was the New York Post's apt verdict.

Watch out, pornbrokers, the British are coming. Perhaps it's about time. A spot of feculence is perhaps welcome from Blighty, after so much worthiness, tweeness and refinement. All the same, exploitation should be seen for what it is. Slumdog may deserve the accolades it's set to receive from the Academy's movie persons. The adulation it's attracting from the sanctimonious is rather less well founded.