Black is beautiful!

Black is stark. Black is elegant.
Black is mellifluous. Black is absorbing. “Black” is also Indian cinema's coming-of-age effort!

We live in a world that's filled with light and it's spectrum of millions of colors. Most of us can separate the blues from the reds and the yellows from the greens. We can, metaphorically speaking, categorize sounds too into different colors based on their aural tones. But sometimes we stumble upon people who are less fortunate and have to live their life with a single color. Those people are the blind deaf-mutes of the world and the color is the color of darkness, the color of silence, the color Black!

Sanjay Leela Bhansali, inspired by the life of Helen Keller, takes this vacuum of human life and weaves a magical, almost surreal picture depicting the power of belief and human endeavor in a light that dispels the very notion the movie is based on. He takes the erstwhile black canvas of a blind deaf-mute and fills it with the colors of human resolve, hope and indomitable spirit. It shows that with guidance and encouragement even handicaps of epic proportions can be overcome.

The movie, in short, portrays the life of Michelle McNally, a blind deaf-mute girl and her relationship with a quirky teacher Debraj Sahai who refuses to give up in spite of the gargantuan proportions of the task at hand, which is to make Michelle learn to live life as normally as possible.

On the cinematic front, Bhansali works at his usual grand scale, only the fiery reds and bright turquoises of his earlier films get replaced by darker shades of brown and black. His canvas is big and almost Bergmanesque in many frames reminding you of the ice cold Swedish imagery with lavish doses of black thrown in to break the monotony. True to the theme and the name of the film, Bhansali uses color in a masterful manner to supplement the moods of his frames. It is magical and makes you want to go back to those haunting images again and again.

The performances embellish this superlative effort in movie making. First, its the mesmerizing portrayal of the young Michelle by Ayesha Kapoor which evokes a sense of both despair and hope in the viewer. It makes you look helplessly on as you are introduced to her sightless soundless world, and it makes you choke with emotion to see her learn to perform tasks which seemed Herculean a while ago. It is the performance of a lifetime and is delivered with authority and convincing aplomb.

Rani carries on from where Ayesha leaves off in her portrayal of Michelle and delivers a performance which is surely her best till date. She gives the character a sense of pride and infuses it with a never-say-die spirit on the screen.

Amitabh Bachchan as the idiosyncratic Debraj Sahai delivers a performance that leaves you both baffled and flabbergasted. His initial scenes of quirk, underlined by some fine dialogues by Prakash Kapadia, and later his first scenes in the McNally household give you a feeling of unsettlement. (which in retrospect I can see why) As the story unfolds, Amitabh's actions make more and more sense. They reflect the intensity of Michelle McNally as a perfect mirror. He is her voice and eyes. He is her 'Teacher'. He shouts at her, challenges her, inspires her, loves her and then forgets her!
Amitabh is simply fluid in every aspect of his persona.

Together, from their very first scenes in the movie, Amitabh and Rani inhabit their roles so completely, acting with such simultaneous command and finesse that the occasional bouts of histrionics that Bhansali offers can not distract us from their relationship. Both of them act with supreme nuance and neither is ever less than compelling!
Shernaz Patel deserves mention for her wonderful portrayal as a helpless doting mother.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali has created a movie which will make every film maker in his right mind push the envelope a little bit more. It is, and should be, the watershed moment of contemporary Indian cinema, akin to Ray's Pather Panchali. If marketed and promoted correctly, Bhansali might bag the ultimate honor for a movie, just like the man he's trying to emulate, Ingmar Bergman, did many a times.

In the last scene of the movie, Debraj Sahai opens up a symbolical window to his mind. The music rises to a crescendo as he takes Michelle's hand and makes her feel the rain.
The memories come back flooding in, only this time the landscape of these memories is not black, its stark white…

Black is beautiful!