Movie Review: Midnight's Children

Movie Review: Midnight's Children - directed by Deepa Mehta

This blog is a part of my classroom activity of Postcolonial Studies: Film Screening: “Midnight's Children”.

Here is blog link of given task: 

Midnight children movie is

                                       Directed by Deepa Mehta

                                      Screenplay by : Salman Rushdie 

                                     Release date : 9 September 2012

                   The narrator of Midnight's Children is born at midnight on the day of India's independence from Britain. Bidisha investigates how Salman Rushdie uses the life of one man to explore Indian postcolonial experience.

                                      

                                              You wait a year for a film version of a Booker prize-winning magical realist novel largely concerned with people from the Indian subcontinent and widely considered to be unfilmable. Then suddenly two come along: Life of Pi and Midnight's Children. The lesser of the two, though a movie of ambition and distinction, Midnight's Children was published in 1981 and is adapted for the screen by its author Salman Rushdie, who also delivers the eloquent narration, a reworking of the book's framing device.

                                          As a film and novel, Midnight's Children is a great baggy work covering over 60 years in the turbulent history of India and Pakistan from the end of the second world war up to Indira Gandhi's repressive "Emergency" of the late 1970s,

                                       Rushdie's brilliant insight was to bring together the private and public lives of those involved by inventing a mystical bond between the children born around the midnight hour of 17 August 1947. The narrator and central character famously remarks: "I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country."

                                      And he and his peers are given special powers( Prophecy, Magic, Metamorphosis).And they become the embodiment of the best hope of the two nations during a period of bad faith, violence and the betrayal of democracy. At the centre is a variation of Mark Twain's tale The Prince and the Pauper: a rich boy and the son of a street musician are swapped at birth in the early seconds of 18.

                                   In the first post partition episode of Midnight's Children, we're briefly shown a poster of the 1957 Film Mother India. Midnight's children a sophisticated urban riposte of mother India's sentimental rural story.

                                They are united by this film in both sorrow and anger for what their homeland is , and drawn together in hopeful anticipation of what it still might be.

Here is full movie,