I Want To Talk Movie Review — Suchaita Tyagi

If lately you’re finding yourself drowning in the noise of every second thing in perpetual crisis mode all over the world and you’re just looking for something that’ll give you enough of a pause to afford you a moment of introspection.

Try this one on for size.

Set in California, I Want To Talk, based on motivational speaker Arjun Sen’s autobiographical book Raising A Father, follows Arjun, a high-ranking marketing executive for whom things are going just great. In the opening scene, Arjun is seen lecturing a junior about the importance of the cheese-pulling in pizza advertisements, obnoxious in his secure position at the company. Soon after is seen calmly playing golf in his cabin after firing a woman. This is a man who doesn’t care for the larger impact of his work or life, knows “Marketing is bullshit,” while being a marketing/ad man himself. He doesn’t know he’s built a façade around him until the day life presents him with a cancer diagnosis and doctors tell him he has 100 days to live.

It is well known that Shoojit Sircar has a knack for figuring out how humans react when someone they love is in pain. In October, Piku had characters battling with this very specific kind of turmoil at hospitals, the last 30 minutes of Sardar Udham portrayed survival guilt cinematically in ways few other films have recently. In I Want to Talk, Sircar once again is trying to better understand the emotional burden of having a physical ailment.

Surprisingly, this exploration relies too heavily on inconsistent voice-over narration. This is a tool the book perhaps uses — I haven’t read it — but Arjun himself talking directly to the audience holds him back from becoming a whole, real person, he remains a character, another, a narrator. Him TELLING his story, as you also SEE it, doesn’t serve much as a window into his psyche, instead adding unnecessary weight to a story that anyway promises to be heavy. At one point, he starts a conversation with God, and in the second half, the voice-over narrator even changes, with his daughter finishing the rest of the story, for… reasons. The journey is already personal; the portrait of a man breaking apart and putting himself back together over and over is intimate enough without the audience hearing that Arjun’s surgeon studied medicine in Russia and moved to the United States 25 years ago. Post his cancer diagnosis, as Arjun drives away, a song plays: “Zindagi aasan nahi. Rakh zara tu hausla.” The film give in to underlining quite a bit.

Amid these broad stroke though, Abhishek Bachchan delivers a subtle and nuanced performance. Arjun is relatable — ruthless in his professional pursuits yet completely at sea in his personal life, like so many of us stuck in capitalist systems. From the indifferent surgeon to his young daughter, Arjun’s interactions change around each person, using a kind of physical acting that’s bereft of all vanity. You feel his swollen body’s discomfort with every step he takes after each surgery. When recovering, he mumbles and grumbles like a man tempted by the allure of taking his frustrations out on whoever is in front of him but stopping himself consistently, cognisant that the only thing keeping his life from deteriorating even further is his control over his own temperament.

Oh, and how wonderful it is to see Johnny Lever show up in a rare dramatic role. Still the “comic relief,” but he also gets to deliver the most poignant line of dialogue: “You die or you don’t die. Could have died means nothing.”

While the story is anchored by Abhishek Bachchan, you are made to believe his character Arjun’s motivation lies in trying to become a better father to his only child, Reya, as he struggles to live. Which is where one misses the Juhi Chaturvedi touch, moment crafted to really GIVE you a POV of the daughter are tragically few. A young Reya is played by Pearle Dey and Ahilya Bamroo is the teenage version. Bamroo decides not to opt for a noticeable American accent in her portrayal, which may have been fine as a standalone acting choice, but considering how very American young Reya sounded, the choice doesn’t quite land. An able performance, nonetheless.

There are different types of isolation in this film- when you chose to be by yourself, you know the joy of playing golf or being single by choice, vs when you don’t have an option but to deal with things solo, like your body persevering through an illness. How you change as a person once you’re forced to look inward in the silence of a hospital room, when the only other alternative is dying. Makes sense its set in the United States, a country so obsessed with individualism, people hardly know anything about anyone anymore.

So Shoojit and writer Ritesh Shah, invite viewers to slow down and reflect. They introduce moments of stillness — Arjun and Reya sitting by a serene lake, Arjun lying on the floor after he’s already had a fall off camera — to allow both the character and the audience to breathe and realize that extraordinary things often occur in the most ordinary settings, when doesn’t need to always be chasing a high. A heart attack doesn’t need to happen specifically after a traumatic incident, it can occur simply in a parking lot. Life is mostly substance over spectacle.

Despite its lovely, slow, indulgent pace, I Want To Talk is also in a weird rush to get things going, not allowing one to begin caring about anyone in the story except Arjun. A nurse who becomes a friend, a landlord who becomes a driver, a friend who becomes a call to action, and a brother who show up for a scene remain footnotes.

But what does stay with is not half bad, no complaints here. Despite the whole cancer and illness, this film might even work as a pick me up for some — reboot as many times as you need to get to where you want to go.