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I Want To Talk Is A Lyrical Film About Death & The Gift Of Living

Shorn of metaphor and allusion, Shoojit Sircar's <em>I Want to Talk </em>is a prosaic portrayal of what it takes to live and how much it takes out of us to survive.

Ishita+Sengupta

Nov 23, 2024

Promo poster for I Want to Talk.

EVERYTHING about I Want to Talk feels incredible. The setting is a town in America and the foreignness of the land is amplified by its casual anonymity. Several scenes are staged inside the cold premises of hospitals; mentions of death punctuate most conversations yet in the two instances in which people die, the news is ferried, almost unceremoniously, by phone calls. No less incredible is the makers’ decision to release the film in theatres, a space dictated by market trappings with more urgency now than ever before. The only thing that fits is the name of the director: Shoojit Sircar.

An easy way to surmise Sircar’s legacy is to acknowledge that no two films made by him are alike. It is, however, also a peripheral remark and reductive in essence. A more accurate approximation would be that not only are his films different from each other but they are also unlike most Hindi films. Across his close to two-decade career, he initiated and cemented a sort of uncompromised filmmaking which feels radical in its persistence. The sublimity of his craft uplifts the mundanity of life. As a result, the playful premise of a sperm donor became a thoughtful portrait of masculinity, and an old man’s nagging complaint about constipation sensitively outlined the difficult relationship between a child and their ageing parent.

In that sense, his recent film is more tangible in its theme — centring on death but unravelling as an affirming tale of life. Shorn of metaphor and allusion (well, not completely), I Want to Talk is about the grime and gift of living. It is a prosaic portrayal of what it takes to live and how much it takes out of us to survive. It is about a man who refuses to give up and by charting his journey, the film culminates as a granular estimation of how much is really needed to keep breathing. The unsentimentality of the suggestion is matched by the filmmaker’s unsentimental treatment where he abstains from designing the story of a man’s will to live as that of him thwarted by an unkind blow of fate. Anyone else would have told the story of the latter but if there are two ways of looking at things, Sircar has forever chosen to look at the side of bearable lightness.

Arjun Sen (Abhishek Bachchan), a marketing expert, is too used to hearing his own voice. He calls himself ordinary but he is living the American dream. After graduating from India, he completed his MBA and got a job in the USA. We see him briefly in the office, a portly man doling out ideas (an antithesis of Don Draper if there ever was one) and impressing his clients. Soon he coughs up blood and ends up in the hospital. The reason is quickly spilled out: laryngeal cancer. His doctor, Jayanta Deb (an excellent Jayant Kriplani) tells him with clinical precision that the cancer has spread to Arjun’s stomach and the insides of his body have to be cut up and stitched together for him to survive.

The denial hovers for a bit but Arjun soon dives headlong to treatment. The film takes both small and big steps from here (the pacing is a thing of wonder) as more and more surgeries pile up. There is no telling of time as if it doesn’t matter. Maybe it does not. We see Arjun moving in and out of hospitals, his body altering slightly with each surgery, him recording videos for his daughter, Reya (the younger version is played by the effective Pearle Dey and Ahilya Bamroo essays the adult) from the hospital, and chasing down his doctor for another operation.

If I Want to Talk spends minimum time on medical intricacies, it reserves even lesser time to expound on Arjun’s personhood before the crisis struck. For a survivor story, an exposition of identity would have been an easier route to gather sympathy. Sircar ostentatiously avoids it, his refusal both underlining the redundancy of it (that morality need not be tied to mortality) and streamlining his intent of putting forth Arjun’s character. What we know of him is strictly how he wants to be — not dead — and not how he was.

The clarity of his desire frees the narrative from the burden of a miracle and informs Sircar’s filmmaking. We hardly ever see the big things happening, their absence implying that in the face of inevitability, it is the smaller things which assume the bigness; that Arjun does not die is as big a miracle as him magically recovering. Perhaps even bigger. We don’t see him coughing up blood. Instead, we see him, alive, looking at his stained shirt. The camera skips the moment of his fall in the bathroom, focusing instead on him regaining consciousness and getting up. A tense moment of him receiving CPR is replaced by him looking at his broken ribs. In another moment, we see a younger Reya accusing Arjun of over-dramatising things till he shows his scar on the stomach. She rushes off to her mother’s car, only her silhouette visible to us. She comes back soon with luggage and a finality that did not exist before. We don’t know why she stayed but we know she did.

The craft is extraordinary (Chandrashekhar Prajapati is credited with editing and Avik Mukhopadhyay is the cinematographer — both Sircar’s long-time collaborators) and makes space for the self-absorption that accompanies living with death. People around Arjun die and his daughter throws in an accusation that he doesn’t know her too well. Their fights carry the viscerality of Piku but are also strangely tamed like Reya is both exasperated and humbled by her father’s condition. As if, much like him, she has learnt to live with it.

Bamroo is compelling as a young daughter living with a stubborn father. She straddles between being affectionate and bitter, scowling her face at him only to muster up an apology. The film, however, rests on Bachchan’s shoulders. The actor is tremendous in inhabiting the physicality of the role. He lets go of vanity and infuses small detailing which adds to his character. For instance, in his voiceover, Bachchan curbs his famous accent and stresses his alphabet to speak Indianised English. Later, when he talks to his clients, the flamboyant accent kicks in. Even then, what he achieves with his body and silence goes the longest way. He changes his gait and slouches his back, carefully calibrating his movement to signal the passing of time. It is a bravura performance where Bachchan does not lose himself to the character. Instead, he remains present and evokes consistent awe because of it.

One could dub this as the actor's greatest turn but the director resists such easy accolades. Just as it is a struggle to put a finger on a distinctive Shoojit Sircar film, it is equally difficult to pin any of his works as the greatest. But if I Want to Talk proves anything, it is the dispensability of such comparisons. It does not matter if his latest is better than his last, or not. What matters though is that in a creatively-challenged time like now, a filmmaker like Shoojit Sircar exists and he wants to talk.