If we are stripped off our eyes and ears, what would our world be? BLACK! BLACK is the story of this unfathomable dark world where there are just sounds of silence. How can we live life in BLACK? Well, a recurrent theme in art-house cinema circles because nothing is more moving than a person living in such a world showing the spirit of life. Bhansali’s poetic interpretation of such a world is what makes BLACK so special.
BLACK is the story of Michelle(Rani Mukherji). Michelle is an unfortunate child without the most gifted senses of creation - eyes and ears. The BLACK of her early years makes you say why-is-this-girl-alive?
After all what’s the point of living life when you cannot see your mamma’s loving face or listen to your papa’s worldly sermons, when all you can see and hear is an ocean of nothingness. This nothingness haunts her into a dual handicap of physical and mental faculties. That’s when an eccentric, supposedly good-for-nothing teacher, Debraj Sahay(Amitabh Bachchan) enters her meaningless life. His obsessive ambition to enter Michelle’s world and make a difference to it changes her life. He starts his lessons with a rude indifference to her perceptions and actions with the purpose of installing a new input-output system for her body.
Starting with a ’’For the world, the alphabet starts with A-B-C, but your alphabet starts with B-L-A-C-K.’’, he makes her love BLACK. With Debraj as guardian to her soul, Michelle mellows into a sweet, little lady who touches, tastes and smells life. Expressing herself completely through her body... she dances to the church’s rhymes, smells the onset of rain and snow, relishes the taste of ice-cream... and experiences the seamless possibilities and absurd impossibilities of life. Michelle joins a regular arts college passing a brilliant interview with a special panel. Even with the support of Debraj, she fails in the class repeatedly. He continues to motivate her with ’’fall and rise’’ principles of life saying that his only wish is to see her graduate.
Meanwhile, Debraj debilitates with old age. What he thinks to be an occasional memory-loss accompanying old-age was actually a symptom of progressing Alzheimer’s disease. All the while, she naturally becomes so close to Debraj that she tries to express her sensual desires with him. Debraj realizes that its time for him to make her independent, and leaves into oblivion. 12 years hence, she meets him as a totally helpless doddering old-man with total impairment of thought, speech and memory. Though the doctors have given up on him, she repeats his lessons on him to light his BLACK mind.
Finally, her BLACK graduation dress metaphorising her victory... nourishes his BLACK mind to life. BLACK makes you realize the indomitable potential of human spirit. Like one of Michelle’s lines, ’’You don’t need eyes to dream, but a mind’’.
The acting of Rani Mukherji and Amitabh Bachchan cannot be described separately. They work together complementing each other so well that you actually believe that they are one soul in two bodies. Not only do they comfortably create their career-best roles, but also lend BLACK its universal appeal. It would be extremely unfair to leave out Ayesha(junior Michelle) for her terrific performance as a child ghettoized in the dark voids of darkness. Until I added this line later, I thought she was actually a deaf-dumb-blind child from Hellen-Keller.
The scenes as in typical Bhansali style are designed to directly contrast the inner-world of the protagonist. Though he incorrectly celebrated Devdas’s misery with opulent sets/costumes, here he successfully celebrates Michelle’s misery with beautiful locales of Shimla. Dialogues by Prakash Kapadia are mellow and powerful(as opposed to Devdas’s over-poetic/dramatic ones). Cinematography by Ravi Chandran is brilliant. Thankfully, there are no songs to dilute the theme and the background score by Monty is haunting. Costumes by Sabyasachi are done well. Editing by Bela Segal is crisp and non-indulgent(Bela is the sister of Bhansali). The brilliant technical team gives BLACK a designer feel with the side-effect of taking it closer to Oscars.
Its fantastic to imagine that this was the same person who directed the loud and over-melodramatic Devdas. Sanjay Leela Bhansali(SLB) takes off from where he left Devdas, and comes full-circle with BLACK. Khamoshi, HDDCS, Devdas and Black. Thankfully, the decibel level comes back to zero. After Black, I know that SLB would be remembered as one of the finest directors of Indian cinema because I haven’t seen anyone writing poetry so exquisitely on celluloid.
BLACK would not only go down in the annals of Indian cinema as one of the finest cinema, but also as our closest bet at Oscars. Three Cheers to BLACK!