The success of Slumdog Millionaire is a total contradiction. Once destined for straight-to-video oblivion, it’s now the year’s Oscar winner for Best Picture. Made by British filmmakers, it’s one of the highest-grossing Indian blockbusters in history. But the biggest irony of all may be that a story about rampant poverty is shot with some of the most sophisticated camera equipment available. And Blu-ray is a magnificent way to take in Danny Boyle’s rags-to-riches masala. In fact, the movie is arguably better at home than on celluloid.

Boyle entrusted his film’s look to longtime cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, who cut his teeth back in the 1990s in the video-infatuated Dogme 95 movement, which redefined the acceptable aesthetic parameters of image pixelation. Mantle is responsible for the harrowingly kinetic lensing of Boyle’s 28 Days Later as well as the gorgeous fairytale sheen of Millions—both of which now look like primers for Mantle’s virtuosity on Slumdog Millionaire. (The latter was shot on a combination of 35mm film and HD video.)

Despite its Third World squalor and decrepitude, Slumdog looks and feels thrillingly modern. Mantle’s often contradictory mixture of canted angles, on-the-fly guerrilla camerawork and classical framing owes as much to graphic novels as it does to Hollywood’s studio system. Boyle orchestrates the visual eccentricity with gleeful panache.

A slow-zoom transition—from a flickering TV screen in Jamal’s interrogation room to the stage of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?—is seamless in its subtle digital enhancement. Indeed, whether it’s a choppy flashback of Jamal’s lifelong love, Latika, on a train platform or a recurring shot of a mysterious tubful of money, the digital aesthetic is part and parcel of the storytelling. Shooting entirely in celluloid might have led to a more predictable grain-heavy grit. But video camerawork has become so associated with reality TV, there’s paradoxically a wider berth for a game-show tale like Slumdog’s.

The film was finalized in a computerized environment, so watching the movie on Blu-ray is second only to a digital theatrical projection of the uncompressed file. Then again, maybe not: When Slumdog played the Toronto Film Festival, I found its presentation on a mammoth screen both stunning and a little overwhelming. Only on Blu-ray has my appreciation for the film’s craftsmanship grown; the editing, the direction and above all the cinematography are easier to appreciate on the comparatively smaller dimensions of HDTV. And it’s a true pleasure to watch, loaded with high-contrast whites and blacks, and a sharp color spectrum pushed to its limits. It’s enough to make even this most jaded videophile shout, “Jai ho!” (minus the arm-jabbing gyrations).

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