I fail to see any mastery in the narrative of the most celebrated film of this year. Black. (loosely inspired from the 1962 film "The Miracle Worker" based on Helen Keller's life.) Debraj (Bacchan), the stereotypically cranky genius teacher of Michelle (Mukherjee), a girl born deaf and blind, was supposed to enter a magician - I would have loved to see a Robin Williams there - of Dead Poets' Society, of Patch Adams, of Goodwill Hunting, of the Hook or for that matter a Johny Depp of Finding Neverland or Philippe Noiret of Cinema Paradiso - a magician, a creative genius, a compassionate, enlightened and colourful wizard. What I got instead was a brainless brute for a pedagogically wrong teacher, a monster who incessantly shouts on through the first half of the film at a child he knows can't even hear. The scenes with most potential are the ones treated with most preempted melodrama and least substance. The sequence where Debraj finally gets to training his student for twenty days, for example. Here, director Bhansali, largely considered a master of mis-en-scene, succumbs to hiding the lack of research and screenplay material behind a touch and go montage, squeezing the whole story of Michelle's training (loosely based on Anne Sullivan's struggle to teach communication to the blind and deaf Helen Keller), which is later going to develop into the second plot point of the film. Michelle's world remains relatively unexplored throughout the film, but for melodramatic purposes. There are infinite references to the title in the dialogue, but we never understand how is Black different to green or scarlet or turquoise to a completely deaf and blind girl when she is not even aware of the existence of other colours to make a comparative statement like that. There wasn't a single reference to her training in colour references or rhythm recognition, again something that gets hidden under Ravi Chandran's immaculate chiaroscuro. Each frame of Chandran's could be printed as a work of art, but his cinematography was largely incoherent with the narrative. I'd flatter it to say that for me, it reached Conrad Hall levels, but failed to show me either Michelle's or Debraj's world, and stayed confused between the two, like the narrative, itself. Art director Omung Kumar successfully creates an Eastern Europe in North India, but leads Chandran in incoherency with the story. Robert Frost's 'Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening' has been used on the walls of a sign linguist's house, where one expects to see a dictionary of homespun signs and words inscribed on the walls. McNally's Anglo-Indian house looks like a museum, where Shernaz Patel gives a tiresome performance as a postcard. The Hindi dialogue of the film belongs to a story like Devdas and the English dialogue belongs in a Class 5 Balbharati textbook. The semi-final blow comes when director Bhansali rips off a scene from his own film Khamoshee. The emotionally pulsating climax of Khamoshee where Nana's character gives a thank you speech in sign language becomes a tearjerker pre-climax in Black, with Rani swapping places with Nana, and Shernaz with Manisha. The climax again is brilliant, you are just about to say, "good, at least caught one out of the many juggled balls", when comes the final blow - the dénouement. A yet another mumbled painting. Now some great scenes quickly - the first hospital scene where Bacchan is walking in one direction and Rani in the other; the "enlightenment" scene where Bacchan throws Rani in water; the party scene where Rani lip reads the singer, the campus bench scene where Rani teases Bacchan about the snowfall she predicted, not giving him the umbrella; the kiss scene; the only melodramatic scene in this list - the climax, "water". First Swades, then Black. Indeed, it is a great phase for Indian Cinema - the phase of transition.
