'black'

bhansalis 'small' follow up to devdas is anything but. i have a feeling matters concerning scale are absolutely of no concern to him. an intimate story of a deaf blind girl and her relationship with her teacher get blown to cinemascope proportions with high melodrama and opulent staging. theatrical, rich, stylized and carefully detailed. Cleansed of all grittiness and dirt, the emotions are 'pure'- like an abstraction of the mood- saturated- joy, pleasure, sadness, pride, wistfulness, longing, further emphasized by the liquid light around all the characters.

sometimes though the characters seemed to be too small for the setting. like the towering bachchan squeezing his larger than life self into the body of the alcoholic teacher suffering from alzheimers. the persona often broke through, and surprisingly most of the time did not matter. in fact it was sometimes a relief to see amitabh in such a splendid space rather than the teacher he was supposed to be.

and somewhere in there is bhansali the film student referencing 'the remains of the day' to 'the age of innocence' to kieslowski's 'blue' to chaplin. His own eclecticism moderates them all into that uniquely effective vision. i fall for it every time. i cried and cried. beautiful film.

this is a must see for all kinds of reasons, not least the presentation of relationships that do not fall easily into the moral and amoral categories we so easily subscribe to -the jealousies, insecurities and longings of the characters that are not necessarily the 'right' way to feel but are perhaps the 'real'- if any such reality exists on planet bhansali.