here are two instances in Black (2005) where a teacher slaps his student. Both times, the slap is followed by a light-bulb moment. The first time, the student – Michelle McNally (Ayesha Kapur) – discovers that objects she touches have names that can be spelt and spoken; the second time, the older Michelle (Rani Mukerji) writes an apology on a braille typewriter at blistering speed.

I suppose most viewers in 2005 would have perceived these two moments as major goalposts in a hearing-and-sight-impaired girl’s journey towards a college degree. But for me, a millennial watching Black in 2024, the two slaps hovered like phantoms on the screen long after the credits had rolled.

When Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black dropped on Netflix last month, I, watching it for the first time, was left grappling with the problematic legacy of the film. The movie, upon release, had garlanded its way towards commercial and critical success; a high that led Bhansali to make two more films in predominantly black-blue palette – Saawariya (2007) and Guzarish (2010) – with mixed to negative results.

The National Award-winning Black arguably remains his most acclaimed film, even as he has ventured on to make more commercially accessible cinema. The slaps – or as my generation would put it now, the physical abuse – in the central teacher-student relationship in Black, was shrugged off. The moral complexity at the heart of it couldn’t find a 280-character-limit discourse to latch on to.

One can argue that a huge chunk of cinema before, or in the infancy of, the internet age would fail to live up to the expectations of a hyper-woke culture. From ‘90s Bollywood rom-coms (looking at you, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai) to hit sitcom Friends to Homeland, most culture-defining cinema or television is complicit in perpetuating lazy stereotypes around gender, race and religion. But the abuse in Black, alongside other things, shouldn’t simply be dismissed or vilified. The forces at play here are too nuanced to be picked apart by the hashtagged lingo of our times.

Inspired by Helen Keller’s bio, The Story Of My Life (1903), Black is set in 1950’s Simla and features the McNallys – an Anglo-Indian family. Bhansali’s signature grandeur is peppered here, in the family’s grand mansion, airy rooms, imposing artworks and gigantic furnishings that dwarf everyone, but none more than Michelle. When we first meet the animalistic Michelle through the eyes of her theatrical teacher, Debraj Sahai (Amitabh Bachchan), she isn’t as human so much as an errant spirit trapped inside a human body. The act can come across as a very dated manifestation of madness, but only if we view Michelle’s disability from an abled perspective. Through the course of film, I connected Michelle’s wobbly gait to her heart, walking around and pulsating with life.

One can argue that a huge chunk of cinema before, or in the infancy of, the internet age would fail to live up to the expectations of a hyper-woke culture. From ‘90s Bollywood rom-coms (looking at you, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai) to hit sitcom Friends to Homeland, most culture-defining cinema or television is complicit in perpetuating lazy stereotypes around gender, race and religion. But the abuse in Black, alongside other things, shouldn’t simply be dismissed or vilified. The forces at play here are too nuanced to be picked apart by the hashtagged lingo of our times.

But as her ‘education’ commences, another offender to my new-age sensibilities presents itself. The deaf and mute Michelle is left alone with an adult male stranger. There is thrashing and lashing and pummeling and wrestling between the two, and my mind races to label the assaults unfolding on screen. That Debraj Sahai has eccentricities of his own doesn’t help; A self-proclaimed ‘weary warrior’, he observes Michelle with dreadful fascination, latching onto her as an opportunity for his own redemption. He may be an outlier, an unconventional thinker at odds with the orthodox ways of the family and the times, but he is still an adult male given total charge of a young girl with meshy senses.

But by the end, my misgivings - on edge the entire time - had dampened. There is a hidden conceit in Bhansali’s visuals. Black followed Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and Devdas; cinema built on operatic tragedies, orchestras of color, dramatic flourishes of emotion, and crucially, on violence of rhythmic motion. The imagery of a contorting Chandramukhi, or a pirouetting Nandini, remains evergreen. In Black, Bhansali contrives to give us the sights and sounds on a similar scale with muted colors. He takes on visual opportunities in little things. One scene features Michelle’ and Mr Sahai’s chaplinesque trot along snowy lanes with a postcard backdrop of Oxbridge spires (with Chaplin’s Gold Rush (1925) running in a theater behind them). This treatment gives a big-screen panache to the relationship between Michelle and Mr Sahai, lending it a scaled-up orthodoxy and thus shielding it from conventions of present day cultural biases. They remain in Bhansali-verse but it’s their colors that define his opera.

Similarly, whenever I felt the creepiness at the inevitable physical touch between Michelle and Mr Sahai, I had to slacken my ableist gaze that reduced their language to my moorings. The physicality of their shared existence turns them into conjoined bodies so the touches – gentle or harsh, unsolicited or sought, platonic or sexual – have a blissful reverie that lie outside the norms of social perceptions. Their proximity and resulting intimacy has a visual grammar of its own. Hence the abuse, physical and emotional, is more of a consequence than an act; they don’t collide so much as converge.

Michelle and Mr Sahai’s bond unwittingly eclipses the student-teacher dynamic. Mr Sahai becomes her guardian, the lone friend, the parent, the mentor, the light and ultimately, her god. The movie humanizes their symphony of gestures, just as our urban-millennial gaze imposes contours on the boisterous sea that is their togetherness.

This is how Black passes the test of time, and emerges as a triumph not just in Bhansali’s disability trifecta (Khamoshi, Guzarish) but in his evolving oeuvre. It largely refuses to diminish Michelle Mcnally and the darkness of her world. A huge chunk of the dialogue is in English, staying true to the setting of the film. The only disservice the film can be guilty of is giving us the unnecessary voice-over, that too, in Michelle’s voice. Not only does it spell out the metaphors subtly weaved through the story, it reduces the anatomy of silence the story thrives on. What was wondrous in its elusiveness, is diminished by the self-seriousness of words. Imagine Barfi (2012), Sound Of Metal (2019) or Coda (2021), giving voice to their characters who can’t speak.

Regardless, Black has been carrying many burdens in the 19 years since its release. It is mostly unapologetic, and ferocious in constructing beauty out of bleakness. I can forgive it just as easily as I can embrace its soundless music. It reclaimed humans from the story and in the process, endowed them with mythicality that made it disorienting to view them through the lens of things like morality.