Final Paper Modern Cinema: Narrative Style Of Slumdog Millionaire

Student’s Name:
Instructor’s Name:
Course Number:
Date:
Narrative Style of Slumdog Millionaire.
The film, Slumdog Millionaire, is a drama film produced in 2008 in Britain as an adaptation of the novel, Q & A, written by Vikas Swarup, an Indian Author. Danny Boyle directed the film giving the successful reception that it received in 2008 and 2009 winning eight awards, the greatest number of awards won by a single film during the time. The qualitative analysis on this study proves the hypothesis that although certain aspects of narration of a story in Hollywood are present in the film, other unique styles make the film stand out and be different.
The classical narrative style used by Hollywood film industry refers to the commonly used narrative structure created by Hollywood in the 1900s during its formation and development after adapting to different modes over a long time. Deutsch states that the classical Hollywood narrative style is based on three formats of acts (95). The first of these formats is the setup where the main characters of the film and introduced with a small description of their lives as well as their goals and the difficulties that they are likely to face in the course of the movie to achieve their goals. Also, this is where the conflict is created, and the main villain is identified. The next format is the development where the characters in the film are shown facing the worst of their obstacles while trying to resolve the conflict, get a false hope that fools them into thinking that they have resolved the issue then, they perceive that the conflict is still on (Deutsch 98). The final part is called the resolution or the climax of the film. Here, all the course actions of the film are aimed at completely resolving the conflict. The person who resolves the conflict in this segment is the hero of the film.
The narrative style of Slumdog Millionaire differs from the mentioned classical Hollywood style in several ways. This is because the story effectively narrated in stages and chapters where the beginning of the film shows a non-linear structure of telling a narrative using a co-existence of flashbacks and foreshadowing. Anjaria & Ulka state that the story is told in three stages using the technicalities of three completely different universes intertwined with the mentioned literary devices (41). This is to say, the scene where Jamal Malik is interrogated by the police is the present time of the film, the scenes where the characters are living in slums is a flashback and the scene of ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ is the flash-forward of the latter. The difference in this section is that the film does not directly adopt the three-structure format of Hollywood to tell its story. Instead, Boyle employs a unique structure where he uses two parallel narratives to tell the full story of the film (Anjaria & Ulka 43). This is considered utterly unique because in the end, after the long twist of events, the classical narrative style of Slumdog Millionaire shows a perfect correlation of the two narratives yielding one full story of a boy named Jamal Malik, a former street boy and his eventual success in search of love.
The film appreciates the process of the setup, the dev...