Blade Crawler – Weekend – Kommersant
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The first season of Shantaram, starring Charlie Hunnam, is coming to Apple TV+ and is about a quarter of Gregory David Roberts’ 1,000-page autobiographical novel.
A lean, blond man (Charlie Hunnam) breaks out of an Australian prison with an accomplice. The scene where he sneaks along the roof and descends from the prison tower, almost in front of armed guards, immediately sets up an adventurous mood in the spirit of the 19th century novels that Shantaram inherits – even the prison itself looks like an old castle. The fugitive gets a fake passport in the name of Lindsey Ford and flies to Bombay – the year is 1982, and the city still bears the colonial British name. At the airport, Lin immediately stumbles upon a friendly and annoying taxi driver Prabaker (Shubam Saraf) and allows himself to be taken into circulation: he settles him in a provincial hotel and introduces him to the local motley and hectic life. Just by chance, right on the street, Lin finds a girlfriend – she almost gets hit by a car, but a pretty brunette pulls him out by the hand onto the sidewalk. This Carla is also a foreigner (Antonia Desplat, daughter of the honored film composer Alexandre Desplat), but she has been living in Bombay for a long time and knows all the bad places.
Since this is a providential novel, fateful acquaintances here happen as if on a click: one – and instantly found a best friend, two – and the woman of your life is standing in front of you. So it’s no surprise that for Carla’s sake, Lin would take the risk and help get her wayward friend out of the brothel. And then he will become a victim of the revenge of an influential bander: he will be robbed on the street and his money and passport will be taken away, but for obvious reasons he cannot get a new one. We know from flashbacks that his former Australian love got Lin hooked on heroin and he became a robber. Fate clearly leads him along the well-known circle “stole – drank – to prison”, and therefore, without undue remorse, you can spoil the season finale: at the end, the hero will be at the same point as at the beginning. Not a life, but shit, but Lin has like nine lives, and he always starts a new one.
And, as you know, it’s not easy to start a new life in the pragmatic West (even if it is in Australia) – for spiritual enlightenment, young degenerates of the hippie sixties rushed to the East in droves. The plot of “Shantaram” is very similar to the 1969 film “Roads of Kathmandu”, in which the young and debauched heroes of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin were looking for new meanings in life, but found drugs and the mafia. The author of Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts, belongs to a generation whose youth fell on the 1970s, so the idea of finding oneself in blessed India is like a native to him, and Lin’s biography is mostly written off from his own. He wrote the novel while in prison and published it in 2003 – and then millennial readers arrived: the generation of downshifting and eternal vacations in Goa fell in love with the ideas and practices of the seventies more than ever.
Adventures, which would be more than enough for several characters, are constantly interspersed with Lin’s wise reasoning – after all, it’s dishonorable for a spiritual reborn from the seventies to just ride a kolobok through life, getting poked and poked. In a series that sparkles with exotic scenes of Indian life (India was filmed in Thailand), Charlie Hunnam’s voice-over utters meaningful platitudes endlessly – about fate, second chances and spiritual experience. Threatened, stranded and without a passport, Lin takes refuge in the slums on the outskirts of Bombay, where his friend Prabu is from. He studies the Marathi language and after a fire that he himself set up, he becomes a slum doctor – enlightened, he treats poor people for free. “Why are you helping me when we barely know each other?” he asks Prabu. And he receives an answer that amazed him: “We are poor people, we have no food and work, and we simply will not survive if we do not help each other!” But this blissful story will soon be replaced by another: Lin again, as if by chance, meets the influential mafia Abdel Qader Khan (Alexander Siddig), sees his father figure in him and returns to criminal activity. “Unhappiness makes strange bedmates,” Karla notes on this occasion, quoting a character from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: for the heroes of Shantaram, Shakespeare and Marc Bolan are equally suitable as sources of significant quotations. Nevertheless, the adventures of a fugitive from misfortune with the addition of ageless mantras about the spiritual path to the East are a harmless and rather charming thing, but the series drags on terribly slowly: Lin is always running from something, and the action is crawling, and by the season finale the series will barely master whether a quarter of the novel.
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