Sort of. I suppose the difference is that Von Trier explicitly acknowledged them as 'unrealistic' and metaphoric tales with the way he shot his two US films (and Dancer). Which is why Von Trier's films seem in some ways to be less offensive as they never really pretend to be about a country, just a non-plane travelling Dane's impressions of the US through the exposure to American culture that we all have, where ever we live (and how that culture is changed and interpreted by people who otherwise have no exposure to other aspects of America!) The US films are less interesting because of their narratives than for their exploration of issues of human behaviour - everything else is just set dressing.MichaelB wrote:Didn't Lars Von Trier do something more or less identical? Twice?Salman Rushdie wrote:Listening to him, I imagined an Indian film director making a movie about New York low-life and saying that he had done so because he knew nothing about New York and had indeed never been there. He would have been torn limb from limb by critical opinion.
If a version of Slumdog Millionaire was created to be closer to something like Dogville, then Boyle would have shot it in a warehouse on the outskirts of London and it would have been about his idea of India that he had received through watching Bollywood films (there is a little of that with the final dance sequence, though it sounds as if he didn't have much exposure to them before making the film) or the way Hollywood films interpreted India to the rest of the world, maybe mixed with a little Satyajit Ray! Then the use of British Indian actors in the main roles instead of trying for an indiginous verisimilitude would actually add a meaningful extra dimension (as using black British actors in some of the roles of the slaves did in Manderley). The one element of Slumdog that inadvertenly captures something of the idea of that is the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? set, since the darkened studio seems to be the same set up around the world!
They are two very different approaches to filmmaking. Neither is the 'right' or 'wrong' way to go about making a film (though I prefer something like Dogville - imagine if Slumdog had drawn chalk marks on the ground and the poor kid was being tortured by the police ten feet away from an oblivious studio audience! India (or Brazil) would be a great place to use that kind of style, showing wealth and poverty existing side by side, and the self-inflicted blindness required in order not to acknowledge that fact. The Five Obstructions has a few sequences with that idea as their subject), but I do agree somewhat with the Rushdie argument about slum tourism, where we get the thrill of danger and experiencing the darker side of life but with the assurance of a happy ending that makes the suffering worthwhile.
That is why I would place the film below The Beach (even Boyle's slightly watered down film of it), as that material was all about tourism and looking for a 'real' holiday experience (as defined by your expectations of what a real experience would be), but of not being able to cope with that reality when you encounter it, instead moulding it to fit in with your own fragile expectations and projections without acknowledging such to be the case. Which sort of negates the lofty purpose of travelling to "see the world" in the first place. Slumdog, even if unintentionally, would seem to make an excellent double bill with The Beach.Now that sort of exoticism has lost its appeal; people want, instead, enough grit and violence to convince themselves that what they are seeing is authentic; but it's still tourism
The one thing to come out of this is that my interest in seeing The Darjeeling Limited has been reignited!
That part with the American tourists, what a disasterous, ridiculous cliche. Bleck. 
