Sanjay Leela Bhansali
Black

There are moments in life when we need to rediscover our inner child. Infants. Open to everything while in the closed world of dreams or shadows. These are just moments, of course, mere moments, where time is truly defeated by a blink and the mind surrenders to the evidence: we are again who we had lost sight of for a while in man. We had been hungry for places and thirsty for seasons and believed that by walking along this path of stones and flowers—yes, indeed, this beautiful avenue of stubble at the edge of our dry ankles—we would eventually find ourselves in paradise. Or whatever the devil they've always told us paradise is.

Instead, it's worth taking leave from maturity one April afternoon like any other, suspended as it is between precarious piecework and a sky heavy with clouds and lightning, deflating the abomination of wisdom, shedding the cloak of 'know-it-all' and sitting on the ground, feeling the earth of the room and the rooms of the earth, and in front of a television watching a movie like "Black."

Because "Black" is a wonderful movie, indeed it is a sublime way to become child-men and child-viewers again. Perhaps, also, man-viewers. Everything changes. Or many things. First and foremost, the judgment—always ignoble, I would say—I had given to that great carnival of lavish productive laziness commonly referred to as Bollywood. A term marked by a factory hallmark that combines many things; from Kajol's mischievous breasts to one of the most despairing scenes in "Dil se," and which left me almost nothing in heart and mind. Of all that I knew. It turns much of that hazy melo into clear water, which, encountered here and there wrongly, had been repudiated as if it contained in itself—no less than we were always in San Antonio Bay on the day of the centennial—dead ghosts thirsty for my yawns. Finally, "Black" transforms the idea that one cannot make a half-remake-and-a-half, with the firm belief that cinema is the art of honest deception ("Le voyage cost me almost 10 thousand francs, and I even fooled more than one financier to finish it, and now they want to ruin me with their illegal copies!" Georges Méliès reportedly shouted as soon as he was told about the first act of piracy remembered by cinematic history), and that as such everything is permitted to it. With a touch of fervor. With a kalam of art. With enthusiasm, perhaps.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali takes it from afar, recovering some steps from the autobiographical "The story of my life" by Helen Keller, watching and re-watching "The miracle worker" by Arthur Penn but—and here, fervor, art, and enthusiasm suddenly become one thing—imagining a screenplay that 'develops' the 'healing' of the deaf-blind girl, in his tremendous search to put the terms of the thorny issue back in play. What is the realm of the real, as it is perceived, how much of it is communicable, to what extent is it possible to assert that nothing is impossible for human senses (or for their handicap-sublimation)?

The story of “Black” is as clear as light. On one side, there's the world. With father Paul (the actor Dhritiman Chatterjee), who loves his daughter but cannot show his affection and hides this incapacity beneath a veneer of furious impatience. His constant outbursts of anger are, in reality, a vent for the anguish of being unable to change an oppressive and uncomfortable situation. With the mother, the capable theater actress, known both in India and in England, Shernaz Patel, who here demonstrates her skill in balancing delicate poise with strong expressive spirit. Catherine McNally is a character who manages to capture her daughter's problems; if necessary, she is ready to fight society, head-on, against the banners of prejudice and any moral standard. In the end, she is the driving force that shapes her extraordinary offspring's character, allowing the innate sense for gesture and vocal sound to become transmission.

In a middle ground, let's say better in perpetual orbit around the planet but with eyes and heart fixed on the mute satellite that one stares at as soon as gaze and attention are lifted, stands a tenacious, obsessive, and passionate Amitabh Bachchan who brings to his character—the professor Debraj Sahai—all the power of his personality. He is the stubborn teacher (although he himself ironically qualifies as "a magician beginning his magic"), determined to follow every possibility, to tread all paths, both known and unknown, to pull a mind from the darkness of reason and a creature from the iron gates of the asylum. A sort of Al Pacino lookalike who, once on stage, never exits it, modeling the screenplay around his quirks, his glamour, his desperate inner affliction that compels him to challenge every convention and to seek—when he manages to peel himself from the neck of the bottle and the shadows of his inner demons— "the flow that connects god to his creatures."

Finally, a wild moon in a sky of fire and ancestral scents, she moves. Michelle McNally; portrayed in childhood by a breathtaking Ayesha Kapur ("She is a star, a monster of courage, a genius of spontaneity and balance, she's not merely a child but a being who already has the aura of a rockstar!" and watching closely her performance, how can one not subscribe to Bhansali's enthusiastic words?), and in adulthood by a surprising Rani Mukherjee, who dignifiedly chisels a bright and curious character, often driven by a vivacity on the brink of instinctual.

These are the three concentric circles, the three trajectories bent by the gravity of human existence that create the system into which we are catapulted by the vision of the film. We too, astronauts lost in the black of a universe in which only those with experience in certain matters understand and persist in understanding. Or skimming through the air, with ten fingers open, this braille-reality!

The ellipse of "Black" is a true auteur pastiche that mixes musical (Bhansali debuted in the mid-90s, with that genre and with mixed results), wide angles, light play, luminous writing à la Greenaway, pills of learning science not even Piaget ("knowledge can happen in an instant, it takes a spark to set all the accumulated wood on fire"), parts of a biopic with high sentimental (or sentimentalist, after all, we're still in Punjab) content, curious 'video artistic cages' (the play of photographic tones between Debraj now lost in the whirlpools of Alzheimer's, and the shrewd Michelle who wants to give him tit for tat, indeed word for meaning), dark natural lacerations, vivid parodies (to recall at least the scene where Michelle, left alone on the street by the professor to test her sense of direction, with her wide stride pacing back and forth with the cane hanging in front of her, right at the entrance of a cinema where they always show Chaplin films!), unbearable family drifts and portentous directing ideas just sketched.

What remains most impressed is the use of the body as a primary organ of language and the destabilization of sensory barriers; the overturning of the handicap that plays on its field and wins the derby by a large margin, and the never trivial, often lightning implications that the play of the double system senses/meaning offer through the mouths of the two protagonists. "The eyes do not see dreams, but the spirit does. I cannot see with my eyes, yet I dream. I see my dreams," says Michelle in the university hall, rebutting a poetic thesis that denied a second or third or fourth dimension to the knowing reality.

It goes without saying that the first hour of the film is the best (120 minutes, perhaps even too many), the one in which the best alchemies of the script are truly triggered and you see, dancing like on a ring, the wrestlers of light and darkness. But you reach the end of the story without much self-reproach, still seated on the ground, like fifty-year-old children. "A man's journey begins in darkness and ends in darkness. One day we should all pass through this darkness, and enter the light." Ah, but here we're already in the pathetic—by Khrisna!—and it would be wise to stop.

Fervor and art and emphasis. There's no guarantee that all this will bring us close to a masterpiece. But certainly to a charlatan film, Bollywoodian and extraordinary as is licit to expect.