New cinema: "Midnight's Children": Night vision WHEN Sir Salman Rushdie turned in the original manuscript of "Midnight's Children," which won both the Booker prize and the James Tait Black Memorial prize in 1981, it contained an additional narrative voice. Luckily his sensible publisher took the view that this picaresque tale of modern India's birth was complicated enough already, and the superfluous character was removed. Sir Salman, who spent four years adapting his work for the screen, should have employed equal economy with his screenplay. The film is doggedly faithful to the novel, so much so that it is stuffed with plot and much of the story's lyrical beauty is lost along the way. Saleem and Shiva, both born at the precise moment of India's independence, are swapped at birth by a nurse eager to please a revolutionary: "Let the rich be poor and the poor rich." From this moment the two boys are "handcuffed to history" and also to each other, their own identity crises mirroring that of their homeland. The presentation here is as ambitious as its theme, and in the first, more coherent half of the film there is much to admire. Deepa Mehta, a Canadian-Indian director, has conjured up a real feast of a film - with silks, saris and songs galore. Everything is bathed in a supernatural glow; wealth, poverty and pain are all surreally bright. But sumptuousness of this kind cannot make up for the episodic manner in which the story plays out on screen. Characters that viewers have come to be fond of are killed off in a single sentence. The impact of crucial moments, such as the birth-swap, is lost. Even weighty performances, particularly from Satya Bhabha as the grown-up Saleem, fail to rescue the film from feeling both laboured and vague. Perhaps magical realism is just too hard to translate. One cannot imagine how the other "midnight's children," whom Saleem is able to conjure up in his mind with a wrinkle of his famously large nose, could ever have successfully been conveyed. Here their existence is nonsensical and half-hearted. Cloaked in a fuzzy half-light, they feel frustratingly unrealistic. The best thing about this adaptation are the words that Sir Salman, as off-screen narrator, has lifted straight from the book. Which does raise the question, why not just read the book instead?