‘I Want To Talk’ review: Living on a thin line

Shoojit Sircar’s recent film work has been preoccupied with mortality. Shiuli’s freak accident and subsequent state determine the course of October (2018). Gulabo Sitabo (2020) is a comic look at death, with an ageing man hoping for the demise of his even older wife. And Sardar Udham is death-haunted, not just the historical fact of the protagonist’s execution but the guiding hand of the ghosts of Jallianwala Bagh. 

I Want To Talk, directed by Sircar and written by Ritesh Shah, introduces the possibility of death about 10 minutes in, and never lets it fade from view. Arjun (Abhishek Bachchan) is a marketing professional in California, highly successful if rather unfeeling and shallow. During a presentation, he starts coughing violently. The next scene is Arjun in hospital. The scene after that, a doctor tells him he has cancer and probably 100 days to live.

In a few scenes, the film—almost matter-of-factly—upends its central character’s life. Dr Deb (Jayant Kripalani), his surgeon, lays out the extent of cancerous growth in Arjun’s lungs and stomach just as matter-of-factly (so much so that the patient requests he draw his incisions and removals on a diagram instead of pointing at him). After a short spell of denial, Arjun places all his hope in treatment. But the cancer keeps resurfacing. There are other health issues. The surgeries pile up. 

The quickness is crucial. Sircar keeps the film moving so fleetly you’d think it has to get somewhere important. It doesn’t—but the sentimentality and pity that would envelop the story if we lingered on Arjun and his terrible luck is undercut by the speed of storytelling. We see a changed Arjun every 10 to 15 minutes, sometimes weeks older, sometimes a few years (the editor is longtime Sircar collaborator Chandrashekhar Prajapati). One audacious jump comes after his young daughter, Reya (Pearle Dey, an unusually sombre child actor), realises the full extent of his condition. She enters his home with a determination that signals she’s here to stay. In the next scene, Reya is a teenager (played by Ahilya Bamroo), still around helping her father even as he drives her up the wall.  

As Arjun, Bachchan is ornery and relentless. It's not a tour de force turn—just imagine what Irrfan Khan, originally intended for the role, could’ve done with this—but it’s the kind of ungainly grit the film needs. Arjun grumbles and glares his way through one medical ordeal after another, taking for granted the patience of Dr Deb and Reya. Bachchan’s face is swollen, his voice often a whisper or croak; his stomach is bloated and scarred from surgeries. It’s a performance of no vanity—but actors are happy to sacrifice vanity for ‘meaningful’ parts. What is more impressive is how little sympathy he seems to seek. Arjun isn’t a charismatic figure before the cancer, and it’s not like he becomes more likeable after. He goes to great lengths to keep his ability to talk, yet he has little of note to say. All he does is survive, but he does that with every fibre of his being.

It helps that Bamroo is so warm and winning that you end up hoping Arjun catches a break just so Reya can live her life. A child of divorce, she shows all the human emotion her father can’t—panic, affection, resentment. Sircar doesn’t prevent their dynamic from becoming like Amitabh Bachchan and Deepika Padukone in Piku: cantankerous, ailing Bengali dad annoys his loving, long-suffering daughter (though, aside from asking for fish fry before a particularly gnarly surgery, there's nothing about Bachchan that's particularly Bengali). When they're sitting in the park, he remarks that she’s beginning to sound like her mother. Reya laughs and says, “I am Maa. You can’t be surprised I’ve got more of her in me than you.” It’s not an accusation but she’s right. As much as he has no use of extraneous emotion in his fight, she needs all the humanity she can summon to carry on.  

Cinematographer Avik Mukhopadhyay worked up rare magic in Sircar’s last few films. Their approach on I Want To Talk is more conventional, lacking the austere beauty of October and Sardar Udham and the invention of great illness films like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Perhaps some of this is down to shooting in a foreign country—the camera doesn’t pick out interesting details the way it would in more familiar environments. 

At the end, the real-life Arjun turns up and addresses the camera briefly. I don’t like this now-common practice—it strikes me as a naked bid for audience appreciation of performance as makeup and accent work and fealty to the original. It’s also a way of pushing viewers to sympathise because the events of the film happened to real people. Yet, if the work in question is strong enough, that sympathy will come unbidden. In its methodical, unsparing way, I Want to Talk is strong enough.