Recensione di Alpie

Once again a Sanjay Leela Bhansali film has just shown everyone what is wrong with Bollywood, how mediocre and pretentious films can be over glorified by critics, just because it has been made by a "great" director. Black is just another take another take on the ever-green classic Koshish which was made by a truly great director Gulzar. SLB first film Khamoshi was his first attempt at trying to emulate Koshish, he failed that time and frankly he has failed on his second attempt, but I take it from this film, he will continue to attempt to the original until he finally succeeds. Once again SLB has used fanciful camera-work and lavish art direction to cover the gaping holes in his film, something which he has been doing since his first film. I have read many reviews praising Amitabh Bachchan's performance in this film, but I akin his performance to Kiron Kher's performance in Devdas, something which is truly horrific. Rani Mukerjee acted very well, amongst the present crop of actors in Hindi speaking films, her performance is one of the best, but when you widen the scope to all time, she would be way down the list. But lets just compare her acting to that of Seema Biswas or Jaya Bhaduri and you do find her lacking. As for the other faults in the film, once again overly melodramatic, with a background score which keeps pushing the ambiance in to melodrama. Monty's background score once again weak. Though I do admit that apart from A.R Rahman and Maestro Illayraja, there isn't anyone who can do justice to a film with a quality background score. One of the biggest problem with Black, is that it doesn't engage the audience, you don't care about Michelle's struggle and nor are we made to care, until perhaps the last scene where once again the scene is over melodramatic, and has strong shades of Nana Patekar's speech in Khamoshi, which was much better.

Is this the best of Bollywood? I sincerely hope not, these are the kind of films which have caused me to turn my back on Hindi films and look at other films, ranging from Tamil to Japanese. All I can say is that Bollywood lags far far behind