‘I Want to Talk’ Review: Shoojit Sircar Reinvents the Cinema of the Tearjerker With a Superb Abhishek Bachchan

Director: Shoojit Sircar
Writer: Ritesh Shah
Cast: Abhishek Bachchan, Ahilya Bamroo, Jayant Kripalani, Johnny Lever, Naivedhi Pearle Dey, Kristin Goddard
Language: Hindi

I Want to Talk adapts the life of a man named Arjun Sen. Arjun (Abhishek Bachchan) is a talkative California-based marketing boss living the American Dream — until he isn’t. He gets laryngeal cancer, countless surgeries, several death sentences, and spends years in and out of the hospital. He loses his job and moves into a smaller house. He goes through a divorce and confronts a strained future with his daughter, Reya (Ahilya Bamroo). Basically, Arjun suffers. A lot. This makes him the perfect candidate for a movie that wants your feelings. He is a human background score. He is the hero of a cancer story, surrounded by typical it-takes-a-village characters: a no-nonsense doctor, a compassionate nurse, a kind friend, a funny handyman. He is the protagonist of a broken family drama, with a daughter who’s forced to be wise (and irritated) beyond her years. He is, in every way, an underdog ripe for cinematic milking.

But Arjun Sen is also a Shoojit Sircar character. So his circumstances are not a marketing motto. Along with writer Ritesh Shah, Sircar makes a remarkable movie that channels the dry essence of the person it’s about. After a few initial jitters — including a good cry and a meltdown — Arjun doesn’t make a big deal out of his pain. In turn, neither does the film. He doesn’t like the words “average” and “manipulate,” and so the film is neither average nor manipulative. In his opening scene, we see him on the job, instructing his team to stretch the cheese-pulling shot in their new pizza advert; his career revolves around convincing — manipulating — strangers to buy products. Once he is diagnosed, though, his story edits out the cheese-pulling shots of life itself. The film refuses to frame his suffering as a shiny product. Arjun asks his doctors to illustrate the procedures on diagrams first so that he doesn’t have to look into their eyes, so that there’s no scope for slow-motion tears and reactions. His voice-overs are matter-of-factly: “A heart attack? Really, god?” He has a lucky strolley bag and treats hospital stays as a prosaic part of his existence, like a businessman checking in and out of hotels.

Most of all, he doesn’t bother his family and friends. His handyman (Johnny Lever) picks him up after the longer procedures, but Arjun’s self-sufficiency is almost offensive; he mostly drives himself to and from the hospital. He doesn’t talk about it with Reya either — it reaches a point where she demands to see his scars because the word on the street is that Arjun is pretending to be sick. Who can blame them? Arjun is more of a cultural marvel than a medical one. Advertising feelings like pain, joy and sadness is a distinctly South Asian trait; Bollywood melodrama is merely a manifestation of this trait (the recent Vijay 69 is an example). Most of us can’t imagine not wanting to be cared for; emotional dependence and main character energy are inherent parts of who we are. By eschewing this core of expression, the film enters uncharted territory, almost disorienting the viewer with its 9-to-5-coded despair. It implies that Arjun’s reluctance to ask for help is not an ego or masculinity thing. At one level, the selfishness of a man is replaced by the selflessness of a parent; he admits that his guilt of subjecting Reya to a divorce stops him from burdening her further. At another level, it’s a coping mechanism that allows him to avoid being an ‘inspirational’ or ‘tragic’ narrative. He lives to survive; there’s no bigger agenda. The labels lie in the eyes of the beholder. Arjun isn’t staged to be a message, even if the posters and creatives of I Want to Talk suggest otherwise. That’s the irony of a film like this — its genetic resistance to sell the human condition has to be sold.

I Want to Talk harnesses the spirit of the director’s four best movies. It has the father-daughter tensions of Piku, the patient-doctor prickliness of Vicky Donor, the hospital ghosts of October (if Dan and Shuili were the same person), and the genre subversions of Sardar Udham. By choosing not to be a certain kind of film, and by eliminating a bunch of vital organs, it also becomes a version of Arjun’s body. At one point, he is told that he will have only five percent of his stomach left (his dad joke: “I am officially a gutless man”). When the surgeon (a superb Jayant Kripalani) impatiently explains every incision to Arjun, it feels like Shoojit Sircar interacting with the film. Sircar removes the cancerous parts of the quintessential tearjerker and stitches up the rest, trusting its muted persistence to ‘convince’ the viewer in a way that storytelling gimmicks cannot. The doctor and Arjun have a banter-filled bond that mirrors the maker’s cheeky pragmatism with his movie. Even a trope like a marathon race becomes more of an exercise in psychological rhythm than narrative indulgence.

Abhishek Bachchan and Ahilya Bamroo

That’s not to say the tone is inert or algorithmic. On the contrary, our relationship with the film is heightened. It’s a version of the old horror-movie adage: you fear what you cannot see. It invites us to project our personal insecurities and anxieties onto a character who declines to be one. For instance, it’s moving to watch Reya slowly wake up to the silence of her father’s suffering. She initially assumes that his distance stems from his unwillingness to look beyond himself, but it’s only as a teenager that she realises how the distance stemmed from an inability to look beyond her all along — it allowed her to grow and evolve without the trauma of caregiving. It also speaks to the specific symptom of a generation of parents who let their children see only what they want them to see. Arjun’s struggle to keep his physical detachment from turning into emotional unavailability is familiar, especially for those — like myself — who’ve grown up in dysfunctional homes. At some point, Arjun’s unvarnished stoicism made me choke up because it took me back to a friend’s cancer journey. I recognised the sight of a man just getting on with it, defying his own instincts while carefully imparting information to his loved ones. Being kept in the dark can be annoying, but Reya’s arc is one of belated light. It doesn’t absolve Arjun of his limitations, but it normalises his will to live. In other words, the film leaves room for us to feel by association.

The details expand the social intelligence of I Want to Talk. As a little girl, Reya (a charming Naivedhi Pearle Dey) is cruel to her father; she resents him for not knowing her enough, and puts him in her ‘8th circle’ of intimacy. She even displays this in his language, as a colourful diagram on paper. In a way, she keeps trying to break his heart to detect the presence of one; she seeks his pain in order to uncover his capacity to love. The film never reveals the face of Arjun’s ex-wife, but we get a sense of their troubled marriage when Reya’s biases surface against her father. Their scenes don’t victimise him; if anything, the few seconds that the camera stays on him after Reya’s rants exposes his flaws as a partner. Another neat touch: Arjun’s suicidal signs are recognised by the only character whose job requires them to hide their own signs. Arjun’s voice-over has the problem of sounding like it’s written by someone in hindsight; he spells out his ‘mindset’ towards the end, which can be counterproductive to critics trying to decode a thoughtful film. But I like that, this crutch aside, I Want to Talk drops enough hints to indicate that Arjun’s ability to cheat death is defined by his growing inability to manipulate life. He survives more than one freak accident, which only widens the chasm between not dying and living.

The cast is solid all around, but I want to talk about Abhishek Bachchan. For one, Sircar uses him well, mobilising life experience over career experience. It’s the kind of right-time-right-place performance that can only emerge at a particular stage of adulthood. Arjun is established as a talker in love with his own voice. But Bachchan’s voice — an inherited blessing and a curse — has miles in the tank today; it’s the primary character of a film that breaks down the myth of that baritone. More importantly, his portrayal of Arjun involves great body-acting. Arjun’s surrender to science evokes the ‘Ship of Theseus’ paradox: he doubts he is the same person anymore after having most of his original components reduced or replaced. Bachchan’s gait conveys Arjun’s struggle to own the way he moves, looks and feels over time. At some point, his body stops being his — he makes peace with the unfamiliarity of adjusting to a lesser and newer medium of maturing.

There’s also the man’s uncomfortable tryst with attention. Arjun almost looks sorry for dragging the lens away from those who need it more. Despite his persona, the peripheral characters put him in the limelight so that he can keep renegotiating his relationship with pain. Consequently, they exist on the fringes. Every time Arjun resorts to denial or numbness, the film transitions into the future so casually that it plunges him into a crisis of healing. You sense that perhaps he subconsciously starts looking for muscles — and muscle memories — to rebuild. You sense that maybe he gets addicted to the idea of growing differently. You sense that his marketing brain is at odds with the grief of losing himself. After all, the magnitude of his endurance is rooted in the mundanity of it. The energy of I Want to Talk is rooted in the unblinking stillness of it.