Here are some photos from the TIFF premiere of Lion. I’ll talk about the film in a moment, but let’s talk about the fashion first. Dev Patel looks great with his hair longer and some facial hair. It makes him look “grown up,” and I think he should keep it. Nicole Kidman wore Nina Ricci and, um, it looks like she bought herself some new assets. I’ve said for a while that Kidman got a noticeable boob job, but seriously, I think she pulled a Taylor Swift and went up a cup size. Either that or this dress just emphasizes already existing work. And then there’s Rooney Mara’s misery guts. So many of you love her, but she’s just so bland and sullen to me. She doesn’t have to be happy-happy-smiley-smiley all the time, but for goodness sake, she looks like she’s mid-eyeroll in every photo. Her dress is Aouadi and it looks like a Christmas tablecloth.
Last month, I watched the trailer for Lion and I had mixed feelings. It’s taken me a while to figure out why. The film is a true story about an Indian man, played by Dev Patel, who was adopted as a child and raised by a white Australian family (his mother is played by Nicole Kidman) in what seems to be affluence and privilege. He has a girlfriend (?) played by Rooney Mara. He starts remembering his life in India, and he decides to go back to find his blood-related family, his brother and mother. Here’s the trailer:
While I always like it when Dev Patel is cast in something – I love Dev Patel and he looks really hot in some of these scenes – I still couldn’t put my finger on what was bugging me. Maybe I still can’t. Like, I’m glad that cast a British-Indian man as an Indian (Dev is doing an Aussie accent, sort of). I think it’s fine that they show a world in which a white family has adopted a kid that everyone presumed was an orphan. The closest explanation I can come up with for why there’s something nagging me is that it feels emotionally exploitative for no real reason? Like, no one did anything “bad,” and yet there seems to be a need to manufacture drama. The adoptive parents did nothing wrong from what I can see, and they loved his character completely. He has every right to go back to India and look for his birth family. So why all of the swelling music and tears? I don’t know. It feels exploitative. For what it’s worth, the reviews coming out of TIFF seem to confirm my suspicions – there’s no real drama there.
Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet.
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