Black is Beautiful

17 Years of " BLACK"

Black is beautiful..

#LongPost 

Black is a 2005  film made and  directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali and starring Rani Mukerji and Amitabh Bachchan. Black revolves around a deaf blind girl, and her relationship with her teacher who himself later develops Alzheimer's disease. The film draws inspiration from Helen Keller's life and struggle.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali; a filmmaker who enriches and raises the bar of the emotional content within Indian cinema with each one of his movies.

Black is simple, it’s subtle. But within the simplicity and subtlety, Bhansali is able to make you hold your breath and cause every muscle in your body to tense up; not with tear-jerking drama or at nail-biting suspense, but rather at an eight year old girl’s realization of knowing how to utter the word ‘water’ for the first time in her life after being forcefully drenched in the fountain on her front yard by her teacher. 

Black‘s heroine is Michelle McNally (played as a child by Ayesha Kapoor, and as an adult by Rani Mukerji), a girl robbed of her sight and hearing by an illness at a young age. The first half of the movie tracks closely to Keller’s life story. By age eight, Michelle has developed into a wild, almost feral child due to her inability to communicate. Her parents, equally frustrated by being unable to reach their daughter, are on the verge of sending Michelle to an asylum to prevent her from accidentally harming her baby sister, Sarah.

As a last resort, the McNally’s hire eccentric teacher Debraj Sahai (Amitabh Bachchan) to tutor Michelle. Early in the movie, Bachchan’s performance is almost too eccentric to be believable, as Debraj uses unconventional methods to reach out to Michelle.

Debraj is eventually able to teach Michelle the connection between words and objects, and she’s able to finally communicate with her family through sign language. She’s accepted into a university, and Debraj helps her to continue her studies and live on her own. 

At the same time as Michelle suffers through and triumphs over her challenges, we also witness numerous other changes. Debraj begins to succumb to Alzheimer's, first forgetting the way out of the Principal's office and then forgetting Michelle and leaving her stranded during an ice cream celebration for her improved typing. We also see Michelle reconcile with her sister Sarah, who we find out was jealous of her parents' affection for Michelle throughout her life. After attending Sarah's wedding, Michelle begins to wonder about love, which she has not experienced, and she even asks Debraj to kiss her on the lips. Debraj reluctantly does so but decides to leave Michelle on her own because of this demand and the position she has put him in. Twelve years after enrolment, Michelle does manage to gain her BA, and with her proud parents looking on her, she even gives a speech to the graduating class. Without wearing no black graduation robe, she thanks her parents and her teacher and she announces that she will only wear the robe so that her teacher may see her first.

By then Debraj is in a mental hospital due to his almost complete inability to remember his past and even how to speak. Michelle visits him wearing her robe and we see glimmers of memory return as Debraj realises that she has graduated and even does a victory dance. As the window opens to the rain outside, we see Debraj's hand in Michelle's reaching into the rain, and we hear the teacher-student pair say the first syllable of the word "water", with echoes of the scene in which Michelle first begins understanding the meaning of words earlier in the movie. However this time, it is Debraj who is beginning to learn to speak and understand.

Amitabh Bachchan is spellbinding as Debraj and confronts the emotional and ethical issues of tutoring a young woman, as opposed to a little girl. His struggles with a sudden decline in mental function that changes his relationship with Michelle are unique to him.

There are no superlatives to describe his performance.

Rani Mukherjee's performance is so captivating and expressed that it’s easy to forget that she doesn’t deliver any lines of dialogue.

Besides the two leads, Black features a terrific supporting cast. Nandana Sen walks a fine line, showing the despair behind Sarah’s bratty behavior. And Shernaz Patel is wonderful as Michelle’s troubled mother, Catherine. She’s in an impossible situation, trying to protect Michelle even though it exacerbates the girl’s problems while trying not to overlook her other daughter. Catherine is heroic in her own right for not sending Michelle away and, in effect, covering her own eyes and ears to her child’s plight.

Dhritiman Chatterjee’s portrayal of the somber and narrow-minded father is done quite intelligently.

One can go on and on..

The background music by Monty Sharma is melodious and scene centric.

This film is exceptional .

Black is indeed beautiful.