Recensioni de* critic*

Ramin Bahrani’s savage, darkly comic adaptation of Arvind Adiga’s prize-winning The White Tiger is full of these brushstrokes which teeter on the verge of being either banal or profound, but which could only come from a man who has clawed his way up the caste-class ladder in India.

Although it leans heavily on narration, the film’s skittish cinematography brings texture to the backdrop and a satisfying depth to the characters.

Not that The White Tiger isn’t a pleasure to watch; the film is often darkly funny, and its stars bring buoyant energy to the story’s first half. It can occasionally feel a little aimless, but the threads all converge in the end

Painting Indian family life as a grim trap for rich and poor alike takes nerve... But under Balram’s gimlet eye it joins the skewed political and economic systems as yet another dysfunctional, life-shredding institution.

Balram’s insistent, cheerful narration slowly gives way to reveal the darker story that The White Tiger always was, about the force of will and cruelty required to get ahead in a depraved society where the rules of class are ironclad. So too does Bahrani’s style shift, from the eclectic, poppy freneticism of the film’s first half to something grim, unhinged, maybe even a little surreal.

The White Tiger, a fiction set in the recent past, in a real place, is a compelling and extremely well crafted crime drama. But the price Balram pays for his success is a steep one, and the movie’s ending is more unsettling than it is exhilarating. It makes you feel you’ve been left with a problem you can’t solve.

Shrewdly, whenever Balram sheepishly apologizes for any of his transgressions; he is really saying, "Sorry, not sorry." And this is why "The White Tiger" is so enthralling. Balram plays both sides, and Bahrani admires how he games the system to get what he wants, even as he lightly chastises him for doing that.

Although less imaginative in his world-building style here than in his 24-hour-news-cycle approach to Ray Bradbury’s seminal text, Bahrani has maintained the darkly comedic, progressively resentful energy of Adiga’s debut.

Bahrani’s shrewd instincts as a storyteller, including his instinctive pessimism and refusal of sentimentality, serve him well here, but there is something about the dark cynicism-verging-on-glibness at the heart of Adiga’s story that ultimately eludes him.

The plot is lively, and the settings vividly captured by Bahrani and the director of photography, Paolo Carnera, but the characters don’t quite come to life.

The White Tiger is going for a mass audience. Despite an overly knotty middle section, it’ll keep bums on sofas and spark debate because it’s both happy to offend and keen to please.

It's a film that knows its terrain and its aesthetic contradictions, whether it's invoking the glossy, prestige look beloved of big-tech streaming-services, or bouncing along to a global soundtrack of new-millennium pop... precisely the kind of mid-aughts smash that a rich landowner's son and a poor kid might conspiratorially bond to over the radio.