As he says: crime or politics.īalram (Adarsh Gourav) is a smart kid born to a very poor family in one of India’s lower castes. And it does so by zeroing in on one man’s life, the people he encounters, and his realizations about what it takes to vault the barrier. Like those films, The White Tiger takes a twofold approach to exploring inequality: It taps into the broader, well-established systems in India that make it extraordinarily difficult to move between social classes. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark But there’s been a crescendo in the past few years, spanning the globe from Senegal ( Atlantics) to Spain ( The Platform), Brazil ( Bacurau) to Korea ( Parasite), the United Kingdom ( Sorry We Missed You) to the United States ( Sorry to Bother You). Inequality and class conflicts are themes that have always echoed across world cinema. Later, he explains further: “For the poor, there are only two ways to get to the top: crime or politics.”īut then he hurls the all-important, innocent-sounding question: “Is it that way in your country too?”Īdapted from the Booker Prize-winning 2008 novel by Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger is a funny and ferocious dip into India’s caste system and, more broadly, the cultural mechanisms that keep the poor in their place.

“Don’t think for a second there’s a million-rupee game show you can win to get out,” he says. Speaking of the poverty into which he was born, our narrator Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav) pointedly rebuffs the earlier story for us, the movie’s viewers. Comparisons between Netflix’s The White Tiger and Danny Boyle’s Oscar-winning 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire were always going to be inevitable - poor boy in India makes good, becomes rich - but lest you miss the similarities, The White Tiger makes sure you can’t.

The white tiger 2008