midnight's children

Moira+I went to the Watershed this afternoon to see the long-awaited film version of Salman Rushdie’s book (published in 1980) of the same name. I haven’t actually read the book – but will hopefully do so over the coming months. It’s essentially a magical story involved two babies born at midnight at the birth of India’s independence, who are switched by the maternity nurse and inherit each other’s lives by mistake. The private and public lives are intertwined in a world of hope, violence and betrayal.

Rushdie’s book took on some 60 years of India’s history (and Pakistan+Bangladesh!), so there’s an awful lot to fit into a two-and-a-half-hour film. In the event, I found the first part of the film rather more compelling (and the child characters too?) and the latter section a little too blurred in terms of the wealth of the country’s recent political history (and the film’s storyline) it tried to fit into the final hour. Nevertheless, a brilliant story and a film well worth seeing – it’s definitely made me want to read the book.