"Salaam Bombay"
                Reviewed by Linda Lopez McAlister
                  On "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM
                        November 14, 1992

This week I didn't see anything in the local theaters that
seemed to fit under the rubric "Women and Film" so I went to the
video store and discovered that Mira Nair's wonderful MISSISSIPPI
MASALA has finally been released on video.  I reviewed that film
when it was in its theaterical run last February, but seeing it in
the video store reminded me what a brilliant filmmaker Mira Nair is
and so I decided to rent her first feature film SALAAM, BOMBAY to
talk about today.  This film was released in 1988 and for it the
novice filmmaker won the New Director Award at the 1988 Cannes Film
Festival and was nominated for the Academy Award in 1989 for the
best foreign film--not bad for your first time out.
    
SALAAM, BOMBAY bears a family resemblance to MISSISSIPPI MASALA
in that both films are about people in large complex networks of
interrelationships, so there are large casts of characters and many
subplots and small character studies.  Whereas MISSISSIPPI MASALA
took place among the Indian and African-American communities in a
small southern town in the U.S., SALAAM, BOMBAY as the title
implies, is set in the streets of Bombay.  It is one of those films
in that venerable but (as far as I know) unnamed genre of films
that chronicle the life and adventures of urban street children.
What's different about this one is that unlike many films of this
ilk it doesn't romanticize the life these children live. It manages
to be at the same time a sympathetic portrait of life among the
pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers and street people of Bombay
without minimizing the horrors of their existence and without being
completely depressing.  It manages this by keeping the focus on the
good impulses of the not-yet-completely-corrupted children and the
way they bond and try to help one another and those they are fond
of, and by not completely closing off the possibility that they
will, somehow, be able to escape from the degredation in which they
live--though the odds seem long indeed.

The film focuses on Krishna, a boy of about 11 or 12, from a
small rural village who has a temporary job with a circus when it
comes to his town.  He plans to follow it, but when he returns from
running an errand for the boss, the circus has already left.
Krishna goes to the railroad station and uses all his savings to
buy a train ticket to the closest city, not even knowing what that
is.  It turns out to be Bombay where he wanders the streets until
he literally stumbles across another boy and a man gathering trash
and runs after them.  The man is a drug dealer named Chillum around
whom clusters a whole group of street kids who earn money picking
up odd jobs, gathering trash, sometimes stealing and who sleep on
the street.  Krishna, who can't read or write and who is looked
upon as a country bumpkin, just as Chillum had once been before he
became hooked on drugs and went to work for Baba, the handsome pimp
and drug dealer who seems to control just about everyone and
everything on the block.  Krishna has a job as a "tea boy"
delivering glasses of tea to anybody in the neighborhood who yells
down and orders it as well as to a regular route.  So he has access
to the whole neighborhood and watches what goes on, including the
way a young girl is sold into prostitution and is "tamed" and
seasoned by the Madam and Baba so that she will come to accept the
life.  Part of the seasoning is Baba's promise that when he gets
enough money he'll take her away from there; a promise we know to
be false because we also get to know Baba's common law wife to whom
he once made the same promise.  She is still working as a call girl
and living in the same building with their daughter, Manju, who
becomes a friend and confederate of Krishna.

Krishna's hope is to get enough money to go home, but his
compassion for his friends, his naivete, and his efforts to help
others get free from the things or people that immobilize them make
that goal an elusive one.

Like Nair's other film this one is visually lush and enormously
evocative of the place and culture in which it is set.  Though a
film that shows without flinching the horrors of street children's
lives can hardly be said to be entertaining, this is both a moving
and a beautiful film by one of the world's best young women
writer/directors.  I recommend it.