When a benevolent stranger brings Saroo to the local police station, the boy asks for his mother, but doesn’t know enough - not her name, nor that of the village from which he came - to find his way home, and so he is delivered to an orphanage, and shortly thereafter, shipped out to Tasmania, where he’s adopted by John and Sue Brierley (played by David Wenham, who’d worked with Davis on “Top of the Lake,” and Kidman, looking just about as unglamorous as she can). As if there was ever any doubt, Davis clearly wants his audience to appreciate how tough it is to be homeless in India, presenting us with a funeral procession and images of scavenging through garbage dumps for anything to eat. Davis ensures that we understand even less of Saroo’s surroundings than he does, which makes his first impressions of Calcutta - sleeping on cardboard, only to be awakened by a child-snatching mob, or else invited home by a sari-clad woman, who tries to pawn him off to a lecherous middleman - seem as dark and intimidating as Pinocchio’s visit to Pleasure Island. There, everyone speaks Bengali, rather than Saroo’s Hindi dialect, making it doubly intimidating for a boy so far-removed from his family. Tagging along with his brother Guddu (Abhishek Bharate) one night, Saroo falls asleep on a decommissioned train, which travels some 1,600 miles before letting him disembark in Calcutta. With only the leanest wisp of a plot to guide him, screenwriter Luke Davies expands Saroo’s ordeal into a full-blown hero’s journey - like “Life of Pi,” with a flesh-and-blood “lion” in place of a CG tiger. “Lion” marks his much-anticipated feature debut, previously pegged to be an adaptation of Gregory David Roberts’ 900-page “Shantaram,” and it’s practically the opposite of that project in every way: “Shantaram” tells of an Australian criminal at large in India, whereas “Lion” describes an Indian kid who discovers his identity Down Under. In 2013, Davis collaborated with Jane Campion on the miniseries “Top of the Lake,” which suggests that he could probably also stretch Saroo’s narrative across four more hours. Meanwhile, Google Earth plays itself.ĭavis, a commercials director whose reel includes Toyota’s “Ninja Kittens” spot, would be a natural to boil Saroo’s story down to a tear-jerking 60 seconds (even if this material sounds like an extended promo for the one company that needs it least).
#Lion in hindi is called saroo movie#
But the movie surrounds these two with Nicole Kidman as Saroo’s adoptive mother, Rooney Mara as his Indian food-loving girlfriend, and Priyanka Bose as the mum he left behind (her smile so lovely she could pass for Rosario Dawson’s South Asian sister). Fortunately for Davis, he’s got a terrific cast, chief among them the pair of charismatic actors who split the lead role: First, newcomer Sunny Pawar wins us over as 5-year-old Saroo, who’s so adorable he could set off an Indian adoption craze (which would suit the humanitarian-minded filmmakers just fine), then “Slumdog Millionaire” star Dev Patel steps in to play the less interesting chapter, as the young man turns to the internet to research where he’s from.