Customer Reviews

Salaam Bombay [VHS]

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4 star:		(3)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a superb film that gives the viewer a bird's-eye view into the plight of India's urban street children. It is done through the experience of young Krishna, an illiterate, country bumpkin of a boy, who is abandoned by his mother at a circus and told not to come home until he has five hundred rupees for having broken something that belonged to his brother. While Krishna is on an errand, the circus packs up and leaves town, and he is left alone to fend for himself.

Krishna uses his last few rupees to travel to a city, which by luck of the draw turns out to be Bombay. Thrust into the life of the street children of Bombay, living among the pimps, hustlers, drug addicts, prostitutes, and throw away children that proliferate in India's urban settlements, a modern day jungle, Krishna struggles to survive. His resourcefulness holds him in good stead. He quickly develops some street smarts and forms attachments. He struggles to earn and save money, so that he can return home to his mother and the family whom he misses, only to be duped in the end by one in whom he had trusted. His story breaks one's heart, as he learns some hard lessons in life.

This is a gritty look into the underbelly and plight of Bombay's poor street children, who call the gutters of its filthy urban streets home. It is filled with the sights and sounds of this urban nightmare. An Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, this highly acclaimed film allows the viewer a peek at another culture, only to find that basic human needs and desires are universal.

This is a superb film that gives the viewer a bird's eye view into the plight of India's urban street children. It is done through the experience of young Krishna, an illiterate, country bumpkin of a boy, who is abandoned by his mother at a circus and told not to come home until he has five hundred rupees for having broken something that belonged to his brother. While Krishna is on an errand, the circus packs up and leaves town, and he is left alone to fend for himself.

Krishna uses his last few rupees to travel to a city, which by luck of the draw turns out to be Bombay. Thrust into the life of the street children of Bombay, living among the pimps, hustlers, drug addicts, prostitutes, and throw away children that proliferate in India's urban settlements, a modern day jungle, Krishna struggles to survive. His resourcefulness holds him in good stead. He quickly develops some street smarts and forms attachments. He struggles to earn and save money, so that he can return home to his mother and the family whom he misses, only to be duped in the end by one whom he had trusted. His story breaks one's heart, as he learns some hard lessons in life.

This is a gritty look into the underbelly and plight of Bombay's poor street children, who call the gutters of its filthy urban streets home. It is filled with the sights and sounds of this urban nightmare. An Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, this highly acclaimed film allows the viewer a peek at another culture, only to find that basic human needs and desires are universal.

Wow, what a tremendous story of innocence lost, of the anonymity of the powerless poor in the big city, and of the global theme of vices that trap such lost souls and suck them dry. This is a monumental film that touched me on so many levels that I can't put it all into words.

Almost the entire film takes place on the streets of Bombay, far from the "Bollywood" silliness of musical melodrama that we in the US usually associate with Indian cinema. These are runaways, prostitutes, junkies, and thieves, but director Mira Nair refuses to treat any of them as props or cliches, showing them as nothing less than fully fleshed human beings. The lead character is an innocent little boy who finds himself thrust into this world, and he becomes closest to two equally innocent young girls who are also on the verge of being swallowed up by the filth around them. Their journey through these few weeks is heartbreaking and chilling, and the ending will stay with you for quite some time.

Mira Nair has gone on to direct several feature films, including Indian-American productions like "Mississippi Masala" with Denzel Washington, but this is far more realized than that one, partly because the characters are more real and partly because the story is much more perfectly and completely told. In "Salaam Bombay!" the actors are mostly street people, several of them so malnourished it hurts to look at them. The realism of the players reflects the unblinking realism of the story, ultimately condemning the situation while celebrating the humanity of the people involved.

This film should be required viewing for anyone who says they like movies.

"Salaam Bombay" is one of those rare pictures that sets out to make a statement and then goes and does so convincingly. The audience is not lectured to but, rather, given the story of a young (pre-teen) Indian boy. He is a very likeable lad and we take an immediate interest in his well-being. He seems to do all the right things while finding himself in all the wrong circumstances. Even though he finds himself among the unsavory of society there is still a loose but visible structure for him to hang onto. Unfortunately, a key element of the story is the way he continues to become seperated from those he trusts and depends on. It reinforces the vulneralibility of our young waif. The ending to the movie is both outstanding and heartbreaking. It makes the statement of the tragedy of abandoned children in metropolitan India.

The acting in "Salaam Bombay" is very good and the juvenile actors hold up their end of the movie. Despite the apparently sour theme, the movie moves along quite well and is entertaining throughout. I watched it with my 12 year old son. Some of the language and situations were a bit "mature" but he was intrigued with the plight of a young boy his age and bothered by the outcome in a way that, I hope, enabled him to appreciate our lives here. This is a movie worth watching.

Salaam Bombay, the critically acclaimed, award-winning film debut, for director and producer, Mira Nair, lives on as a timeless ode to the poverty, hopelessness and tragedy of young street kids, and other residents of the ghettos of Bombay (now Mumbai), India. Nair clearly did her research, for this film, manages to bring out stunningly powerful acting in her young actors (particularly, the lead actor, Shafiq Sayed, as Krishna), and leaves us with haunting and cautionary imagery of the sad reality of street life.

Krishna is a young, uneducated Indian boy, from a small village, who ventures out into Bombay, via train, when he must repay 500 rupees to his family, for reasons that aren't clear to us. He ends up in the one of the poorest, most desolate sections of town, amongst the street urchins and prostitutes. What start out as a transitional living space, for him, and lifestyle (as he makes his money, selling chai), becomes all the more permanent and--ultimately--impossible. He encounters Chillum, a drugdealer he befriends, who starts out as an ally, but whose character and relationship to him changes overtime. He also meets Manju, the daughter of a prostitute, so young and, yet, already so exposed to the darker side of life.

As the film progresses, we forget that these children are acting, and this is a recreation of real-life events. It is amazing, thought-provoking and ultimately heartbreaking......This was only the beginning, for Nair, who has gone on to have a remarkable and brilliant body of work...

This is not so much a movie as it is an educational lesson. This is about real people living their lives on the streets of Bombay. It is very difficult to differentiate between the act and the real thing because so many "ordinary" people were used in the making of this movie. But the people themselves are anything but ordinary. They need to be extraordinary in order to survive their poverty-stricken conditions. This movie is about the survival of life for these people. Every day brings new challenges, primarily seen through the eyes of the boy, Krishna. You want to help him but all you can do is watch. And sometimes, cry. You won't view your life the same way again after seeing this profound movie. The scenes will stay with you. I was so affected by the lead character that years later when I had a child I named him Krishna (my son is part Indian), after him. For people who like special features with their DVDs the features on this one are as long as the movie, including a lengthy discussion with the director, Mira Nair.

I couldn't believe my eyes when I happened to be browsing through the foreign film DVD's and pulled out Salaam Bombay by surprise. I love this film! This is my favorite film in the whole world and in my opinion one of the best films ever made. After searching for such a long time for this film in which I finally found one used copy on VHS, having this film on DVD is a reale prize. Not only do you get the film itself and the quality of the picture is fantastic, but you get so many special features. A major highlight of this DVD is that you get special features with several of the actors that acted in the film. The features present recent interviews with Shafiq Syed the lead character in the film as well as with the other actors. These feastures are nice because you see the child actors in what they look like now and what became of their lives. You also get footage on a brief history on how the actors were recruited off the streets and the making of the film. The features also present footage with director Mira Nair and other production crew of the film. This is a really great film and the way Mira Nair shot and directed the film was very clever. This film has a documentary type quality to it and filming was done entirely on the streets of Mumbai(Bombay)so you get an upclose reality of what some of the streets of Bombay look like and the lives of the poor and the street children. This is an excellent film and I am grateful to have this DVD, may favorite film of all time!

Those of you who have seen Mira Nair's "Monsoon Wedding" have seen how that movie was full of joy, hope, colors, music, and new ties that are born. That was a movie on a certain kind of new India, a new India that unfortunately still does not touch many in that country. For many Indians life is still what you will find in Salaam Bombay, or a bit better, maybe. This movie is grim, grey, hopeless. This is the grim story of a boy abandoned to himself, without reasons, by the traveling circus he is working for. He will end up doing odd jobs in a Bombay brothel, where he will slowly but stobbornly save the money he needs to go back home. But don't expect a happy ending, because this movie is about despair, and life in a place where the only certainty is abuse. A depressing but splendid movie, one of those movie that show you how life often is, and not how it should be.

Mira Nair shows the realities of living on the streets in Bombay where children sleep under bridges and sell tea to the prostitutes in brothels as they try to earn money to live from day to day ... Primarily, the film revolves around Krishna, a young boy of 11 years, who left his village to work on the streets of Bombay to earn 500 rupees to pay back his brother, whose bicycle he destroyed. He becomes part of a group of kids who hang out together and look out for one another ... They associate with drug dealers and prostitutes. While the film does show how drugs can destroy lives and how young innocent girls are lured into prostitution there is also a truthfulness and innocence which is conveyed ... The film depicts how the kids survive amidst poverty and how they manage to create a sustainable lifestyle with some semblance of happiness and a wonder for life despite having next to nothing in a material sense.

One of the best extra features on this DVD is the commentary by the director. Mira Nair provides insights into how many of the unique scenes were shot. She discusses particular angles and views used by the camera to capture the pure honesty of this lifestyle. She also describes difficulties encountered and how they were resolved, the major one was meeting the budget, the other was was getting big name actors and actresses for the key roles. Fortunately the subject matter was of such importance, a large British studio Filfour agreed to help fund the project if Ms Nair could raise 51% of the budget herself. Another plus was, the subject of the film was deemed a "governement film" and therefore she received funds as well as access to areas which otherwise would be denied, such as the children's home where street kids were taken after arrested. Ms Nair managed to get a popular male stage actor who had never done films to play one of the lead roles and to her delight, he has since become one of India's most famous leading male film actors. She also snared a popular female television soap opera star to play the female lead ...

One of the most unusual but appealing elements in this film is how Ms Nair used actual street children to be the key actors in the film. She held auditions and made selections then held seven week long workshops where they learned their parts via pictures of scenes which they memorized. Another captivating aspect of this film is how real streets with shop keepers and shoppers were filmed along with the real train station and the natural activities which fit the storyline of the film. This film is a magnificent study of a way of life that few people can imagine but it is all too common in poverty stricken areas of the world. Through this film, Mira Nair has brought the attention of the world to the plight of homeless children in India. She has made a great contribution to improving their lives on many levels. Due to her efforts, trusts have been established in Bombay and other major cities to educate and assist these children. The film itself is a mix of documentary and fiction which captures the intimate details of their reality in vivid color, detail, and honesty. This is a most highly recommended film. Erika Borsos {pepper flower}

Former documentarist Mira Nair's angry, disconsolate, and deeply moving drama about poverty and child homelessness in India was shot on location and stars a cast of non-actors the director recruited from Bombay slums. Like De Sica and other Italian neorealists, Nair focuses with unblinking tenderness on the blighted lives of her protagonists, juxtaposing Krishna's squalid existence with the lush extravagance of the Bollywood musicals he so enjoys. Great performances, affecting imagery, and a heartbreaking plotline deservedly won "Salaam" worldwide acclaim.