Of course, a commercial, mainstream film like Lion is hardly going to undermine its own basis by critiquing global capitalism, and, as a romantic melodrama, it is very effective. What should appear creepy – a 12-year old girl’s bio-colonial fantasy – is transformed into a tender familial moment. The film approaches consciousness of this in one particularly bizarre scene in which Sue tells adult Saroo about the “vision” she had as a twelve year old girl that made her determined to, one day, “have two brown-skinned boys.” She’s in tears, and Saroo hugs her, with the emotional charge of the scene negating its critical potential. It’s certainly one of the more explicitly Orientalist visions I’ve seen on the big screen this year. It ends with captions telling us that “Over 80,000 children go missing in India each year”, before pointing towards the virtues of Western adoption of Indian children. But it is particularly notable in Lion because of the film’s ultimate posturing regarding the perilous situation for children in India. Nicole Kidman’s character, Sue Brierley, brings an unsettling racial fetishism to the movie. Yet Lion eschews any genuine political engagement. However, instead of following this through to its logical conclusion – that is, a critique of capitalist globalisation and its attendant economic inequality – it veers towards sentimentalism, sticking to the saccharine path paved by hundreds of Hollywood “overcoming the odds” pics before it.Ī film that is underpinned by the contrast between India’s urban and rural poverty and Australia’s affluence cannot help but be about the processes of capitalist modernity and urbanisation that underpin contemporary consumer culture. The opening sequences, with overhead shots of the Indian countryside contrasting with images of a train cutting into it, gesture towards the dialectical relationship between rural poverty and urban development. In film terms, this is called burbanking: reducing the political problems that form its contextual backdrop to matters of individual psychology and morality. Unfortunately, like most commercial films, Lion doesn’t say anything particularly meaningful about the world. The performances are excellent, with 8-year old Pawar, lighting every scene with his delightful smile, the standout. It is an effective, pleasurably melodramatic film – I challenge anyone to see it without reaching for the tissue box. Despite the length of the film, the construction of the story is economic enough to maintain the viewer’s interest throughout.Įight-year-old Sunny Pawar, who plays a young Saroo Brierley, is the film’s standout. The score by Volker Bertelmann and Dustin O'Halloran is emotively symphonic without a surplus of schmaltz. The photography balances beautiful, epic shots of the Indian and Tasmanian landscapes with pathos-laden close-ups of the main characters. The technical elements of the film are perfectly realised. On the way he falls in love with Lucy (Rooney Mara).

In the second half of the film we follow adult Saroo (Dev Patel) as he sets off on his obsessive quest to find his family.

He ekes out a living as a beggar, narrowly avoiding enslavement as a child prostitute, before winding up in an orphanage, whence he is adopted by Australian couple Sue (Nicole Kidman) and John (David Wenham). Not speaking the common language of Bengali, he’s unable to converse with anyone. The first half follows the imperiled Saroo as a young boy (Sunny Pawar) who finds himself lost in the urban nightmare of Calcutta, thousands of kilometres from home. 25 years later, he uses Google Earth to locate his home village and is reunited with his birth mother. An Australian production written by Luke Davies ( Candy) and adapted from Saroo Brierly’s memoir A Long Way Home (2013), it follows the remarkable true story of an Indian boy who, lost in Calcutta, is adopted by an Australian couple and grows up in Tasmania. Lion is a well-made film starring Dev Patel, Rooney Mara, Nicole Kidman and David Wenham.

A long way home movie