Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Guzaarish, released in November 2010, was the kind of film that generates the peculiar critical position of being praised for its intentions and ambition even by reviewers who found its execution uneven — a film that attempted something difficult enough that falling short of complete success still represented a meaningful achievement.

The film starred Hrithik Roshan as Ethan Mascarenhas, a paralyzed magician who petitions the court for the right to die — euthanasia, or more precisely assisted suicide, a topic that Indian cinema had addressed rarely and that mainstream Bollywood had essentially ignored. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan played his nurse and caregiver, whose love for Ethan complicates his wish to end his life.

Bhansali, who has built his career on films of operatic visual and emotional scale — Devdas, Black, Saawariya — approached the material with a restraint that was remarkable by his standards if not necessarily by the standards of cinema more broadly. The production design was lush but not overwhelming; the performances were asked to carry weight that the visual spectacle was not smothering.

Roshan's performance as Ethan was widely praised as among the best of his career — a physically demanding role in which he played a man who had not moved from the chest down for twelve years, maintaining the character's wit, sexuality, and emotional complexity while largely immobile. The performance carried a film whose script was uneven and whose second half was less disciplined than its first.

Guzaarish opened a conversation about disability, dignity, and the right to die that Indian public discourse was not particularly prepared for. That it did so in the form of a mainstream Bollywood film, with stars and music and beauty, was itself the argument — that these questions belong to everyone, not just to the medical and legal professionals who ordinarily debate them.