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Netflix will show 71 movies this year.

This will probably be one of the most disappointing of them all

Netflix is ​​about to show a record amount of movies this year, and it is clear that many of them will be mediocre and below.

The "White Tiger" coming up this weekend is an example of such a film - a disappointing and inferior adaptation of the excellent and moving novel that exposed the cruelty of Indian society and the world at large.

It is better to read the book

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• The white tiger

• Netflix

Avner Shavit

Friday, January 22, 2021, 00:00

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Trailer for the movie "The White Tiger" (Netflix)

(Photo: PR, Shai Librovsky)

Netflix has two faces: on the one hand, it is a body of content that has provided a warm roof for a variety of fine and sometimes even challenging works, which might not have found another home nowadays.

On the other hand, more than a streaming service, it's a kind of catering company, which produces and absorbs content in wholesale quantities, and then feeds the hungry audience with content - another movie here, another series there, as if it were five schnitzel slices with mashed potatoes on a moving film.

Last week, Netflix announced that they are going to show no less than 71 new movies this year - more than one each week.

In such numbers, it is clear that quantity sometimes comes at the expense of quality, and even the streaming service itself has admitted that it is in no hurry to be proud of everything that is at hand.

Out of all this amount, they chose to highlight only 27 products in the trailer that promoted the gospel, which is understandable: no body of content has ever delivered in one year dozens of cinematic works on each and every one of which are worth writing home.

Of the movies that Netflix seems to be less waving, there is also "The White Tiger," which airs on the weekend and does so with a relatively weak response - it was mentioned in the trailer for just a few seconds, and is now coming out with no flashy marketing campaign, no festival or awards season. And without speaking around him.

This is despite the fact that on the face of it this is an intriguing project - an adaptation of his excellent book of the same name by the Indian Erwind Adiga, who won the Man Boker Prize, one of the most prestigious in the world of literature, and has been translated into many languages, including Hebrew. ץ).

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Our interview with director Ramin Baharny

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Failed casting.

From "The White Tiger" (Photo: PR, Netflix)

In addition, for the adaptation of the matchmaker Ramin Bahrani, a respected American director of Iranian descent, he is one of the only ones in American cinema who has bothered to deal with issues of socio-economic distress for the past two decades.

The cast includes, among others, Priyanka Chopra, Miss World for 2000 and one of the biggest stars in India, and Rajkamur Rao, also one of the most famous actors in the country.

In light of all this, it is clear that expectations were high: one could have hoped that the result would not be "another Netflix movie", but their first Indian quality movie.

Unfortunately, the opposite is true: "The White Tiger" proves that if 71 film products are put on the shelf, many of them will inevitably be mediocre, and once again illustrates an old truth - usually, wonderful books will turn into lukewarm movies.

The sheet is too short to list all the flaws of the film.

Let's start with the easy part.

The cinematic adaptation preserves the plot basis of the book - the story of a young Indian, a member of one of the humiliated castes in the country, who due to his rare skills is nicknamed "the white tiger", as one of the rare animals in existence.

He becomes the close driver of one of the richest men in the country, and thanks to those unique skills, he slowly learns to defeat those stronger than him with their tools and to be released from the social prison into which he was born.

The book is a modern classic: a brilliant, sweeping and moving literary work, which is educated to reveal the deep and everyday ills of class, corrupt and ruthless Indian society, along with universal and moving insights into the human race as well.

It provides us with an immersive reading experience, as it is difficult to put it out of hand, and also presents us with a moral challenge, as it is difficult not to like the hero and identify with him, even though we realize from the beginning what terrible deeds he has committed.

A classic case of "the book was better" (Photo: PR, Netflix)

There is none of this in the film.

The protagonist is played by Adarash Gorab, who is one of his first major roles, and in Forgiveness, is an unsuccessful casting that lacks a hint of the unique charisma of the literary character.

The other actors, for example, also saw the role of the capitalist, find it difficult to express the character of the characters.

In the book they have an ambivalent dimension, but the cinematic adaptation is so crude that there is no room for such complexity.

On the other hand, the film lacks something else: the book manages to shake also thanks to the fact that it has graphic and uncompromising descriptions of the violence that the first India uses against the second India, and of the misery in which those who were not born right live.

The cinematic version, perhaps in an attempt to wink at as wide an audience as possible, does not go far enough and most of the time finds it difficult to illustrate the social critique of the original.

We experience the book through a first-person narrator, and the film aligns with it and uses the narrator's narration, but he presents his fascinating philosophical insights in a way that takes all the sting out of them.

It also has things that were not originally: The tycoon's partner, played by Chopra, gains in the spirit of the days a much larger plot volume than in the literary version, but it is done in a forced and unconvincing manner.

Other added scenes are also unsuccessful, however many significant excerpts from the novel have been cut out, which is a shame.

Hopefully the other 70 movies are better.

From "The White Tiger" (Photo: PR, Netflix)

It's all written out of a deep admiration for the book, and it's not a healthy position: fans are almost always disappointed with the adaptations of their favorite works. But I think that also objectively, "The White Tiger" is a low-level film: the acting displays are terrible, the direction and editing do not have a clear tone and rhythm and the viewing is tedious and unpleasant. Worse, the novel was defined as a sort of antithesis to the ornate licking of "The Riddle Boy from Mumbai," but this adaptation does not look like a negative image of the Oscar-winning film, but rather like a failed imitation of it.

Ramin Baharny has made a name for himself as someone who directs rough-and-tumble realistic films, the kind that are more common in Europe than in the United States. "The White Tiger" is perhaps his most commercial project to date, and the transition has not been successful - neither the director's transition to this style of action, nor the book's transition to the screens. While waiting for the other seventy Netflix movies, it is recommended to settle for the literary version in the meantime.

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