Midnight’s Children

Salman Rushdie is famous for having to go into hiding in 1989 when Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him because of a number of blasphemous passages in The Satanic Verses. Midnight’s Children, however, is a much better book than The Satanic Verses. The film adaptation is directed by Deepa Mehta, who made a name for herself in the late 1990s with the trilogy Fire, Earth, and Water. Like Rushdie, she lives abroad, but she likes talking about India, and doesn’t avoid critiquing it when necessary. Which is convenient because Midnight’s Children is a magic realist epic about how India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh fared in the half century following the collapse of British India. The midnight children are children born on the day India gained independence, 15 August 1947. The story is told from the perspective of Saleem, the son of a poor street singer who was switched at birth with the midnight child of a rich family. So Saleem and Shiva live one another’s difficult lives and come to be diametrically opposed to one another.

The first parts of the film are excellent. Fine photography, good actors, an ambitious story, and beautiful colours make you feel swept away. But the film gradually loses pace. Rushdie has neither the voice nor the talent to provide (desperately needed) narration. You are barraged with enough characters and events to fill a whole TV season. This decent film could have been a good film if only it had taken more distance from the book and had skipped more of its pages. Letting Rushdie himself work on the script was not a very good idea.

Midnight’s Children ●●
UK, CA, 2012, dir.: Deepa Mehta, act.: Satya Bhabha, Shahana Goswami, Rajat Kapoor, 148 min.