Lion (2016)

Napísané CinemaSerf dňa 16. marec, 2025

Though it’s Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman who take top billing, it’s the hugely engaging Sunny Pawar who steals his scenes here as the young Saroo. He’s growing up in rural India with his elder brother Guddu (Abhishek Bharate) living fairly hand to mouth with their mother (Khushi Solanki) and so the two set off into the city to try to make some cash. Once they arrive, though, the young Saroo is too tired to accompany his brother on his search for work, so he has a nap! Next thing, he’s on a locked train heading through the countryside and when he does eventually manage to get off, nobody understands him nor has heard of his hometown. That’s just the start of some adventures that illustrate how dangerous this society can be as he encounters some fairly malevolent souls on his travels. None of this is especially graphically portrayed, but you don’t need a very vivid imagination to appreciate just what some had in mind for this five year old boy. Fortune smiles on him, though, and to Australia he goes where he is adopted by Sue (Kidman) and husband John (David Wenham) and now morphs into Dev Patel. He’s happy enough there, moves to Melbourne and meets Lucy (Rooney Mara) but he’s becoming more and more restless. Despite his comfortable life and his love for his adopted parents, he still pines for his family in India - so sets about trying to put together what he knows, remembers and can glean from Google maps. Can he ever find home? Patel is also a natural here and he manages to convey well the struggle between his innate need to find out what happened at home with his obligations to his parents, a challenge made especially difficult as Sue is having issues of her own which are explained here without sinking into melodrama. The latter stages are also effectively intercut with flashbacks that seem to be fuelling his desires to return but also offer us an opportunity to appreciate just how loving this family was, despite them having to pinch coal from the train to trade for milk. Kidman only really appears sparingly but she offers an impassioned and often quite poignant performance - but neither she nor Patel really hit the potency of the young Pawar who really does make this worth a watch.