Movie Reviews: White Tiger is blackly funny and blazing with anger

— life on a knife-edge in Persian Lessons; and The Exception is a slow-burning thriller that boils down the horror of genocide to its essence

The White Tiger

The White Tiger *****

Persian Lessons ****

The Exception ****

Framed as a letter written by the narrator, Balram (Adarsh Gourav), to a Chinese dignitary visiting India, The White Tiger (15A) opens in Bangalore in 2010 with Balram explaining his meteoric rise from abject poverty to his current status as a celebrated entrepreneur. The story, which is adapted from Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Booker Prize-winning novel, is a coal-black comedy in which 21st century Indian capitalism still adheres to the age-old law of the jungle, in which one eats or is eaten. Born into a lower caste, and thus doomed to become a servant — at best — Balram is the ‘white tiger’ of the title: a once-in-a-generation phenomenon, and a freak of nature who refuses to accept his fate.

Most of the story takes place in 2007, when Balram inveigles his way into the position of driver with a wealthy family in Delhi, where he becomes the trusted confidante of the American-educated Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) and his American-born wife Pinky (Priyanka Chopra). Initially biddable and subservient, Balram’s voiceover grows bitter and cynical: trapped in what is effectively a feudal system of servitude, Balram starts to scheme and plot his escape. Adapted and directed by Ramin Bahrani, The White Tiger is a warts-and-all portrait of modern India, a country bedevilled by corruption from top to bottom and where scarcely conceivable poverty lives cheek-by-jowl with mind-boggling wealth. As a representative of the New India — the smart, educated working class determined to throw off the old shackles. Balram is brilliantly deceitful, disingenuous and callous, and Adarsh Gourav grasps the opportunity with both hands, delivering a gripping performance that garners our sympathy even as his actions becoming increasingly repellent. There’s strong support too from Rajkummar Rao as the wealthy master who somehow deludes himself into believing he has an emotional connection with Balram, while Priyanka Chopra is deliciously fiery as the American feminist who refuses to accept the injustice of the system she has married into.

Blackly funny, blazing with anger and remarkably deft in its upending of clichés, The White Tiger is tour de force. 

(Netflix)

Persian Lessons.

France, 1942. Arrested for being a Jew, Belgian-born Gilles (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) narrowly avoids execution by persuading his captors that he is a Persian, and thus capable of providing Persian Lessons (15A) for Hauptsturmführer Koch (Lars Eidinger), a Nazi master-chef with ambitions to open a restaurant in Teheran. With not a single word of Farsi to call on, Gilles is obliged to invent a whole new language for Koch; meanwhile, the suspicious Beyer (Jonas Nay) plots to unmask Gilles as a Jew, in the process exposing the duplicitous Koch to ridicule. The premise is implausible (the pre-credit sequence claims that the story is based on true events; it is adapted from a short story by Wolfgang Kohlhasse) but a number of elements ensure that the film is compelling throughout. Gilles’s Scheherazade-like plight keeps things on a knife-edge, with immediate death the penalty if his ruse is discovered, and there’s considerable fascination to be found in how he manages to develop his imagined language. Then there’s the portrayal of the minor German characters who populate the camp, whose petty jealousies humanise the Nazi death machine, and render it even more terrifying. Finally, Nahuel Pérez Biscayart and Lars Eidinger are both excellent in their psychologically complex two-hander, Biscayart as the desperately resourceful Gilles and Eidinger in offering a nuanced portrait of a man painfully aware of his own limitations.

(internet release)

Declan Burke # The Exception

The Exception (15A) stars Danica Curcic as Iben, who works in the Danish Centre for Information on Genocide and is currently researching a paper on the nature of evil. When Iben’s friend Malene (Amanda Collin) begins to isolate and subtly ostracise one of their co-workers, Anne-Lise (Sidse Babett Knudsen), Iben gradually starts to realise that evil is intrinsic to human nature. Adapted by Christian Torpe from Christian Anderson’s novel, and directed by Jesper W Nielsen, The Exception is a slow-burning thriller that boils down the horror of genocide to its essence, exploring the reasons why people are motivated to differentiate, exclude and demonise other human beings. The hushed and austere library-like surroundings of the centre are a world away from the killing fields, but the fact that the story is rooted in mundane office politics make it no less profound: the banality of evil writ small, as it were, drives home the ease with which apparently trivial differences can quickly escalate into tragedy.

A fine ensemble cast is rounded out by Lene Maria Christensen as the office secretary Camilla, but Danica Curcic, whose character Iben is haunted by her previous experience of being abducted by terrorists in Kenya, is particularly impressive as the film’s emotional centre.
(internet release)