Enlarge image
Charlie Hunnam as »Linbaba« (with Shubham Saraf): Hidden in the slum
Photo: Roland Neveu / Apple TV+
Sometimes the production conditions under which art is created seep directly into the artwork.
Make it more intense, more urgent,
larger than life
.
Gregory David Roberts wrote his autobiographical novel »Shantaram« in an Australian maximum security prison.
Twice, Roberts claims, guards found and destroyed the almost-completed manuscript.
Perhaps that explains why this almost 1000-page mammoth work offers a special reading experience.
One has the feeling that someone is pouring their life into words, that writing is for survival.
Roberts tells his own incredible story in the novel, published in 2003, albeit in a fictionalized version: he actually experienced the cornerstones, but all other characters are his invention.
Roberts had committed several robberies in the 1970s because of a heroin addiction and had been sentenced to a long prison term.
In 1980 he managed to escape in broad daylight;
he then flew to Bombay with a forged passport, where he was robbed, went into hiding in a slum and came into contact with organized crime.
Now the book has been filmed as a series, and this production story is also highly dramatic.
For nearly 20 years, various Hollywood heavyweights, from Russell Crowe to Johnny Depp to Peter Weir, failed in attempts to make a film out of the novel.
Sometimes there were creative differences of opinion, sometimes the financing burst.
In 2018, Apple finally announced that it was launching a series adaptation.
It wasn't under a good star either: After two episodes had been shot, production was put on hold.
The background is unclear, apparently the production company was the intended version too dark.
She fired the creative team and hired showrunner Steve Lightfoot to write new scripts.
It wasn't until a year and a half later that filming began again in India, but it took longer than expected because leading actor Charlie Hunnam contracted one illness after the other, from intestinal inflammation to dengue fever.
"I've realized that 'Shantaram' has a soul," Hunnam murmured in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald.
"It's an entity that demands to be listened to." One would like to think so given the drama this production has unleashed.
But in contrast to the original novel, the production conditions have not inscribed themselves a bit in the finished series.
On the contrary, the twelve one-hour episodes almost seem as if everything has been done to banish the spirit »Shantaram« and to make it as conventional a piece of television as possible.
This is by no means due to the star of the series.
Charlie Hunnam is the perfect cast for the man who travels to Bombay under the false name Lindsay Ford and wants to start a new life in the metropolis.
One immediately believes the adventurer with the sensitive soul.
In Bombay, Lindsay meets other expats with murky life stories, including Karla (Antonia Desplat), who has become involved with local crime boss Khader Khan (Alexander Siddig).
In the Indian city guide Prabaker (Shubham Saraf), Lindsay finds a friend who helps him when he is robbed on the street and critically injured.
He finds "Linbaba," as he calls him, accommodation in one of the city's largest slums.
Here Lindsay, who had worked as a paramedic in Australia, becomes a doctor for the poor.
In order to get medicines on the black market, he also establishes contacts with Khader Khan – with serious consequences.
In the book, Lindsay's adventures serve to illustrate an inner journey, a spiritual search for meaning, which, however, also leads into the darkest abysses.
Roberts' descriptions of poverty, disease and human depravity avoid any exoticism, they lead into the dark heart of the Indian capital, which was renamed Mumbai in the 1990s.
But that's exactly where the series ends up, with the sometimes uncomfortable gawking at a culture that's been degraded to the colorful background of the problems of white main characters.
Which is because the makers of the abysses, the feverishness and philosophical depth of the novel make an old-fashioned told robber gun.
As you watch, you can literally feel how the numerous screenwriters have extracted individual narrative threads from the thicket of the novel and now run them side by side to increase the tension.
In doing so, however, they achieve the exact opposite: the parallel montage jumps nervously from one scene to the next and leads to a narrative standstill.
Especially since the twelve hours of material only cover the first quarter of the novel.
"Shantaram" is designed for several seasons, which may make economic sense, but not narratively.
In this series something comes up very quickly that is unimaginable when reading the novel: boredom.