A run-time of 148 mins is completely insufficient to cover the labyrinthine mesh of plot lines that characterise a work by Rushdie. A paragraph`s worth of synopsis is vastly more inadequate. Suffice to say that the film centres on Saleem (Satya Bahba), a young man who was born into poverty but swapped at birth with Shiva (Purav Bhandare), a child born to a richer family. Born during the historic moment of India`s independence, Saleem and the rest of Midnight`s Children have mystical powers, their young lives entwined with the historical trajectory of a fledgling India.
As executive producer, narrator, screenwriter and an advisor in the casting process, Rushdie ascertained that Midnight`s Children hewed as closely to the novel as possible. Unfortunately, when said novel is more unfilmable than other ambitious literary adaptations such as Cloud Atlas or Life of Pi, the result is a film that inevitably collapses under its own narrative density. To illustrate, the film, like the novel, begins with the courtship of Saleem`s grandmother by his grandfatherâ€