Mira Nair brings a documentarian’s sensibility to her texturally rich narrative feature debut, Salaam Bombay! At the center of the film is 10-year-old Krishna (Shafiq Syed), who, upon arriving in Bombay (now Mumbai), quickly learns that those who live in the slums of the city adhere to a dog-eat-dog mindset, because surviving here goes hand in hand with taking some awfully mighty hard knocks.
Krishna, whom everyone calls Chaipau, works odd jobs, including serving tea to pimps, sex workers, and drug dealers, with the hopes of getting back to his village. Salaam Bombay! focuses on the relationships that he forges within this environment, including with an older heroin addict and father figure, Chillum (Raghubir Yadav), who nags him for money to feed his insatiable habit. Just as the younger Manju (Hansa Vithal)—daughter of the neighborhood’s most powerful pimp and drug dealer, Baba (Nana Patekar)—nurses a crush on our hero, Krishna pines for Solasaal (Chanda Sharma), a teenaged victim of sex trafficking.
Through these secondary characters, a window is opened into the seedy pockets of a city, but despite its graphic depiction of life in the slums of Bombay, the film doesn’t amount to poverty porn. Nair, working from a script by Sooni Taraporevala, doesn’t care for moral judgment, nor does she set out to make anyone look like a pure villain. Even Baba, for all his cruelty and hypocrisy, exhibits moments of tenderness toward his wife, daughter, and Solasaal.
Given how propulsive Salaam Bombay! is for so long, it feels as if it comes to a screeching halt once Krishna gets sent to a juvenile detention center. But even as its initially loose narrative takes on a more familiar shape, Nair’s film never feels less than authentically alive. It provides a tender, intimate look at the harsh realities of poverty in Bombay without ever caving to cheap sentimentality, neither reveling in the nastiness of what’s heaped upon young Krishna across his perilous journey nor coddling its audience by providing him and others an easy way out.
Image/Sound
The 4K digital restoration that the Criterion Collection has transferred features a sharp image with strong depth, allowing every visual detail in the gritty cityscape, from cracks in buildings to the textures of fabrics, to come through with the utmost clarity. Skin tones and colors are naturalistic, with the brighter splashes of color in much of the clothing rendered vibrantly and with great accuracy. The uncompressed soundtrack is robust, nicely balancing the constant background noise of people and traffic with the dialogue by the film’s principle players.
Extras
In the first of two archival audio commentaries from 2003, Mira Nair talks about getting her start making cinéma vérité documentaries, her collaboration with screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, and, most interestingly, the acting workshop used to train her non-professional actors. In the second track, director of photography Sandi Sissel gets into the technical nuts and bolts of the film’s cinematography, detailing how many shots and the general look of the film were achieved, providing a real behind-the-scenes look at her process.
The lone new extra on the disc is a conversation between Nair and composer L. Subramaniam, who reminisce about working on their first fiction feature and discuss the process of conceiving of and refining the score. There are also a handful of short interviews from 2003 with Taraporevala, who delves into her research process and fine-tuning her script, and several of the actors, who share some fond memories and talk about the voice and acting training they received. Rounding out the package is a foldout booklet with an essay by film critic Devika Girish that explores how the film blurs the boundary between documentary and narrative.
Overall
The Criterion Collection has outfitted Mira Nair’s narrative feature debut with a spiffy new transfer and a solid slate of informative extras.
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