black

[lobelia321]

Last night, I saw Black on DVD.

It was quite hammy and absurd in its first half, and fairly copied from that Helen Keller film with the Laura Ingalls girl in it, but then, in the second half, it grew on me.

It's about a deaf-blind girl whose wildness is tamed by a teacher. When she grows up, she falls in love with the teacher but it cannot be.



It was dangermousie who alerted me to the over-the-topness of Sanjay Leela Bhansali's sets, and this film is quite stage-like and stylised in its lavish and un-realistic sets. The location-shooting happens in the snowy heights of Simla: it looks very nice.

Amitab Bachchan plays the teacher, and goodness me, he is an old ham. But all is redeemed by Rani Mukherjee who is compelling in the role of the grown-up blind-deaf girl. She has this funny way of jerking her head around and staring into space without seeing anything. She is really quite brilliant, and I love her as an actress. She is very down-to-earth and non-hammy, and her voice is gorgeously husky and smoky (she does some internal-voice-overs; her actual speech is confined to monosyllables).



I didn't quite understand why she has to walk in a weird, penguin-footed way, as if she has had a hip dislocation as well as an optical disability.



But perhaps it is a reference to Charlie Chaplin and Raj Kapoor's Chaplinesque persona of the 1950s:



I wept a few times, despite myself, because I get easily moved by melodramas. *shrugs sheepishly*



I also saw Dhoom 2 which had its longueurs but one highlight was a full-on, mouth-to-mouth kiss. Now, this is rare in Hindi films. So I was surprised when Black also featured one! Between an elderly gent and a young deafblind girl! It is very sexy and well-done; there is much angst and tenderness.

Heeh. Bollywood kisses. Somehow the rarer they are, the sexier they seem to me when they appear.

Dhoom 2 kiss on youtube

Black kiss Rani Mukherjee / Amitabh Bachchan: sadly not youtubed. :-( Yet I found it the lovelier kiss.

Also: Rani practically throws herself at Amitabh. And because of the blindness thing, the age difference is interestingly nuanced: she can't see him, after all. She's not put off. She's also a true innocent. But whoa, she's the one who makes the moves, and Amitabh is totally thrown into disarray.

Her lovely line afterwards: In giving me dignity as a woman, you lost your dignity as a teacher.

Comments

[mystico-tala.livejournal.com]

I kind of figured it was because she was unsure of when she was going to bump into something. Like people in a pitch black cave, you know? They just don't stroll along, even if the path isn't uneven, they kind of stumble around with their hands out. And maybe she stubbed her toes enough to figure out that walking pigeon toed hurt less. Just an idea. Then again, I know blind people and they don't walk like that...Good movie though, very sad.
And omg, Dhoom 2 was the first Bollywood movie I had seen that had anything remotely close to a kiss and it was a FULL one. I was floored when I saw it. I figured they must have been flipping out in India!

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

The kiss was nice, and very explicit, and very long. But the rest of the film somehow left me cold, alas.