City of Joy is a 1992 inspirational film starring Patrick Swayze by French director Roland Joffé (The Mission and The Killing Fields). The drama takes place amid the poverty of Calcutta slums.
The film begins when rural farmer Hazari Pal (Om Puri) moves to Calcutta with his wife Kamla (Shabana Azmi) and three children after a drought wipes out their village. They are soon cheated out of their rent money and become homeless. Hazari struggles to support his family, but eventually finds work as a rickshaw driver. But the family lives on the edge of economic disaster and struggles with goals like their daughter can't get married without a dowry.
Swayze plays Houston surgeon Max Lowe who feels despair after losing a young patient. So he takes a long vacation, travels to India seeking spiritual enlightenment. A robbery leaves Lowe injured, broke, and without identification on the streets of Calcutta. Hazari helps Lowe recover by taking him to a slum named "City of Joy". Irish nurse Joan Bethel runs a free health clinic who eventually persuades a reluctant Lowe to contribute his medical skills.
This film was produced by Allied Filmmakers
and distributed by TriStar Pictures.
This film provides examples of:
- Despair Event Horizon: Max Lowe leaves his medical career in despair when a young patient dies. Lowe travels to Calcutta looking for spiritual enlightenment and hope. Inverted because Lowe becomes less depressed by the end of the movie from finding community with slum dwellers.
- Fish out of Water: Both Hazari and Lowe are robbed when they were new to Calcutta and unprepared for its criminal element. This common experience helps begin their friendship.
- The Film of the Book: The original novel by Dominique Lapierre was more successful than the movie. The uplifting feeling of peace at the end of the novel is well earned. The book explores levels of poverty.
- Glasgow Grin: The main antagonist Ashok Ghatak, the son of a Godfather-like mafia figure in India, use this as his preferred punishment against females. He does it once to a minor female character, and late in the film, he attempts to do it to Anouar's daughter in retaliation to his defiance, but is unable to go through with it.
- Good Samaritan: Hazari finds help for Lowe after Lowe was robbed, injured, and left without identification.
- White Man's Burden: Downplayed since Dr. Lowe came to Calcutta to shake himself out of depression, not save anybody, but he discovers that his medical skills could make a difference. Justified in the case of the Irish nurse Joan Bethel, since it is her job to run a free health clinic ministering to the sick and homeless.
