“Will you dance at my wedding?”, a young Reya (Pearle Dey) asks her visibly-ill father, Arjun (Abhishek Bachchan), sitting in their backyard. Arjun used to be a high-flying, pragmatic, proud ad executive in Los Angeles, till one day he was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer. It’s a loaded question – especially for a still-squeaky voice. The initial prognosis gave Arjun 100 days to live. But he’s somehow lived his way through a few months, maybe even a year. While he awaits future surgeries, many things hang in the balance for Arjun, preventing him from giving Reya an answer. The scene ends with the father-daughter’s heavy silence, staring into a distance.
A still from ‘I Want to Talk’.
Shoojit Sircar’s I Want To Talk is the latest in the small sub-genre of Hindi film that feast on Bengali hypochondria, their fascination with medicines, medical terms, hospital settings, embracing moments of unexpected humour in those dead-serious establishments. Sircar used this setting to make his winsome Piku (2015) that revolved around the colour of stool samples and an idiosyncratic father-daughter relationship. He does something similar here, by grounding the medical drama in a similar central dynamic. But what was ‘endearing’ in Sircar’s 2015 film has progressively edged towards tone-deaf, grating or simply puerile. Like in a scene in Sircar’s October (2018), Dan (Varun Dhawan) tries to give the comatose Shiuli (Banita Sandhu) a makeover, by threading her eyebrows and smearing make-up on her still face. Similarly, this film has a scene where a doctor (Jayant Kripalani) and his patient (Arjun) are implied to be staring at the latter’s stool sample. If it floats, he can go home. If not, he must remain in the hospital. There’s another scene around a mishap caused by a cancer patient’s lactating breasts. I get Sircar and writer Ritesh Shah trying to infuse humour into sombre hospital scenes, but they seem to be trying too hard here.
Nothing much really happens in I Want To Talk, which is a relief, and hardly something one can say about needy Hindi films constituting cinematic universes, plying its audiences with easter eggs, in-jokes and meta Bollywood references these days. For a film centred around a terminally-ill protagonist, I Want To Talk doesn’t go out of its way to cultivate commiseration for Arjun. We live with him and Reya as they battle his declining health condition, and negotiate the space between them. The grown-up version of Reya is played by Ahilya Bamroo. It is an impressive piece of casting, given that the film has much to do with voice, language, and diction, and Bamroo’s claim-to-fame on Instagram is her ability to do accents. It also helps that she’s an intuitive actor, perfect for high-schooler Reya, fed up with parenting her father, while also putting up with his overbearing nature.
A still from ‘I Want to Talk’.
I’ve always been a fan of Jayant Kripalani’s neat dialogue delivery and I enjoyed watching him as Dr Deb — a man so committed to his vocation, he even talks with surgical precision. Feelings and empathy might not be his forte. Some might dub Deb an unfeeling man.
Then here’s Johnny Lever in a role that looks heavily edited out. I kept wishing one of his scenes would leave an impact — after all, he’s been Hindi cinema’s timeless good samaritan. Alas, nothing sticks.
Which brings us to the leading man, Abhishek Bachchan as Arjun. The fact that he actually shaved off his head and eyebrows (instead of wearing a nifty-looking bald cap like his colleagues), and is not shy about showcasing his potbelly filled with post-surgery scars, deserves some props. But there’s something inherently undercooked within Bachchan, that gets in the way of him simply being on screen. Without adequate direction, Bachchan tends to ‘perform’ his performances – which can take a viewer out of a scene. But there are also moments when Bachchan lets his sad eyes convey his grief and cowardice, something pages of dialogue wouldn’t be able to do. I was however put off by Bachchan the moment he pronounced his name as ‘Aur-jun’, instead of ‘Ore-jun’ – which is how a Bengali might pronounce it. It could simply be a pet-peeve of mine, but I will never understand why directors don’t make an effort to hide such blatant inauthenticity. Bachchan’s performance as Arjun kept reminding me of his father’s performances in Piku (2015) and Paa (2009) – such are his affectations. This film was apparently written for Irrfan, and the mere thought of him gliding his way through the part of Arjun, presents Bachchan’s competent-but-not-compelling performance in less than favourable light.
A still from ‘I Want to Talk’.
I Want To Talk is one of the more confounding Hindi films I’ve seen recently. It’s a film I wanted to like, but couldn’t because of seemingly crucial gaps in its storytelling. Sircar’s regular Avik Mukhopadhyay doesn’t leave his imprint on the film, the songs (by Taba Chake) and the score (by George Joseph) are adequate, but not particularly memorable. The film itself isn’t bad, but I kept waiting for it to get better. It concludes with a clip showing the real Arjun Sen – and whatever the filmmaker’s reason for using it (as a tribute for his subject, or simply to gloat about how closely the film managed to recreate the character) – screams about the film’s lack of confidence in its own storytelling devices. In its bid to become a wholesome film about a man confronting his mortality (something like Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru), Sircar’s film huffs and puffs its way to the finish line. A slightly closer examination will make you wonder, at what cost.
