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Shoojit Sircar’s latest exploration of human beings’ resilience in existing with disease plaguing one’s body, tackled humorously, is rather muted in the humor but no less effective than 2015’s “Piku.” The similarities with “Piku” don’t end there. After all, Sircar dealt there too with an ailing father and the exploration of that father’s relationship with his daughter. Both “Piku” (2015) and “I Want To Talk” (2024) also share a Bachchan family member as one of the central leads. However, “I Want to Talk” is more focused, almost solipsistically so, towards Arjun Sen, played here by Abhishek Bachchan.
Adapting the true story of laryngeal cancer survivor Arjun Sen, who would go on to live far beyond the 100-day expectancy as diagnosed by the doctors, the film by Sircar while adapting a screenplay by Ritsh Shah, is a much more low-key affair. The film’s relationship with the usual Bollywood comic melodrama, where the sound design and background score carry the lion’s share of evoking emotions, is in sharp contrast. Here the film has an almost minimal background score, almost hammering home the realism and the mundanity of the life faced by Sen.
“I Want to Talk” explores the fragility of life, and especially the suddenness of the onset of a debilitating disease. Sen’s life as a cutthroat advertising executive with a withering mindset towards humanity gets upended by his diagnosis of laryngeal cancer and the flurry of surgeries that he would have to conduct on his body as pieces of his organs are cut away to stop the malignancy. Or how Sen, as he readies himself to meet a friend, suffers from a heart attack and has to be brought back. It’s the mundanity of the occurrence, sans any form of karma, that Sircar truly wants to portray.
But he also wants to portray the quiet resilience and the character’s stubbornness to live his life on his terms without fanfare. The salesman perspective becomes paramount for this film because while the film portrays Sen conducting market research and manipulating his attending physician to let him undergo more and more surgeries to prolong his lifespan, it’s the unspoken and unseen manipulation that Sen applies upon himself that is fascinating. For a movie so solipsistic about its perspective, it is surprisingly distant in exploring the inner turmoil faced by the character.
The inner turmoil is explored by the brief flashes of charming humor and the feathery touches of banter between Sen and his friends and colleagues. The closest the film comes to exploring the emotional turmoil of Sen is his relationship with his daughter, Reya. It is here that we witness his character slowly utilizing his conversational skill and evolving it from the gift of the gab to actually wanting to “talk,” as cancer and the consequent surgeries slowly start to sap away his energy in actually indulging in heartfelt conversations.
The relationship between the father and the daughter is touching and also funny. While the teenage version of Reya, essayed by Ahilya Bamroo, is a steady presence while acting against Bachchan, it’s Pearl Dey as the child iteration who is much more impactful. Johnny Lever, while having limited screen time, is extraordinary in a role that moves away from his usual comedic style. Jayant Kriplani as the world-weary attending physician Doctor Deb is responsible for carrying forward the friendly yet antagonistic banter between the characters and also cleverly exposing exposition regarding the fast-acting nature of the laryngeal disease.
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The film in its low-key treatment, however, is edited with an almost episodic pattern, thus not having much of a discernible momentum or a narrative weaving as smoothly as one would have liked. The choice to heavily focus on Sen and his daughter being the central relationship also doesn’t exactly allow for any of the supporting characters to be fleshed out. Evoking the snapshot nature of the story, where characters move in the narrative as quickly as they are dropped out, they all manage to be somewhat memorable because of the performances.
The film entirely rests on Abhishek Bachachan’s shoulders. It’s a role asking for a nuanced performance, and he delivers. The changes to his character, from the suave advertising executive to the irritable Bengali to the hurt and yet supportive father, require nuanced performance to be effective, especially in such a short runtime, without resorting to over-the-top. And while Sen doesn’t appear to visibly age, choices in Bachachan’s performance, especially in how the Americana facade drops and the inherent Bengali-ness begins to loom large, show the evolution of this character.
I would have liked the film more if it had not relied on the voiceover throughout the narrative. Sen’s voiceover, providing exposition as well as the sarcastic jokes, is at times effective but at times also distracting. The choice to shift the voiceover towards the end to his daughter is also one that feels unnecessary, though again the performances are sufficiently low-key that these curveballs don’t take you out of the movie but rather double down on the emotional resonance.
