How I see Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Black
Black is one Bollywood movie everyone should see. If you have seen only a handful of Hindi popular films, it will alert you to the fact that Bollywood is more than just songs and dance. If you have a background in years of watching Bollywood, Black will fondly reminded you of the great Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Asit Sen, Bimal Roy, and (the quieter films of) Shakti Samanta. It is song less (although the film is filled with music), minus the traditional hero and heroine, is placed in a cold, dark, snowing, and chiaroscuro environment (Shimla and dimly lit neo Victorian sets). The lead actress Rani Mukherjee wears no make-up and her clothes which are Western, never expose more than her face and hands, there is not one single sari in the whole film. The lead actress Rani Mukherjee's dialogue consists of only two words. The lead actor just turned 60 last year. Sanjay Leela Bhansali (SLB)'s Black, subverts nearly all of the expectations of what to expect from a Indian Popular film. Yet this movie is arguably the most quintessential Bollywood Hindi Popular movie to be made in years, and there is no doubt that it is one of the best.
Because at one time, Hindi Popular film was a cinema about melodrama, with songs and dance melded into the story line. And somewhere along the line, in recent years, much of Bollywood has become movies with songs and dance, with stories and melodrama thrown in to fill the gaps. Some of the greatest of Bollywood films have been virtually dance less, and contain only a few songs. One thinks of the great Hrishikesh Mukherjee, and his Anupama, Anand, and Mili. Films that relied on characterization, mood, and settings above the dancing skill of their hero and heroine. In modern day Bollywood one has nearly completely forgotten the whole genre of Indian Popular film called Social Drama. It has taken Black to remind us of that great tradition.
Yet Black is more than just the 1970s Hindi Social Drama translated to the 2000s. It is also a testimony to modern international cinema techniques skillfully used, its intelligent, displaying a knowledge of European art house film makers and sensibilities, and most of all it is a very personal vision from an artist, Mr. Sanjay Leela Bhansali, who ranks with the top directors working in cinema today. Black is a melding of the in your face melodrama of Bollywood with the stilted formalism of European art cinema. Like the Anglo-Indian heroine of the film. Black is a mixing of the gene pool. And it seems that the Indian movie going public, in the Metros and the diaspora at least, are intent on watching Black. It is doing very well at the box office still, in its now fourth week of release. The word of mouth in Mumbai, London, New York, and California, is that Black is the movie to see.
My feeling is that Black will someday hit the international film circuit. It will take a few years of word of mouth, but there is the possibility that Black will reach a larger international audience than SLB's Devdas and will have immensely greater impact. The influence of Black in the West may actually take two or three years to reach the critical acclaim it deserves. It took Devdas two years to be released on a limited scale in the United States. Mani Ratnam's Tamil film Kannathil Muthamittal (2002) was being shown in American film festivals last year. It takes the West a couple of years to catch up with what is happening in Asian and South Asian film.
