Shoojit Sircar never fails to create a special synergy in what he does. By all reckoning, his latest work, a carefully carved masterpiece on life’s vicissitudes and the collateral damage of mortality, is among Sircar’s best works.
Which is not really saying much about a film that says so much on why we need to focus on and edify every minute of life.
I Want To Talk is an odd name for a work that values silences so passionately. This is one of Shoojit’s quietest and most effective films. The grim theme of terminal illness and the ensuing trauma never overpowers that spirit of resilience and survival that courses through the veins of this outstanding work of many virtues, all tender and splendid.
Standing tall at the centre of Shoojit’s infallible drama is Abhishek Bachchan. To call this his career’s best is doing no justice to what he and the film have achieved. Playing a true-life terminally ill man who is given just months to live by his supercilious-to-the-point-of-being-insensitive doctor (Jayant Kripalani, wonderful), Abhishek plunges into his determined-not-to-be-doomed character with wolfish hunger.
It is tempting to say that all his recent pain and grief in real life are alchemized into a performance that is, in the end, not a performance at all. As Arjun Sen, Abhishek Bachchan takes us on an immersive odyssey through the heart, soul, and body of a physically and emotionally broken man who stubbornly—or, as he says, persistently—won’t give up.
This is not the first film about a man determined to fight his illness, and certainly not the last. But it is decidedly the most life-changing.
Shoojit and his excellent writers, Ritesh Shah, and Tushar Sheetal Jain, do an exemplary job of telling an impeccably designed story about a man on the mend. In the life-defining process of healing and mending, there are so many heart-stopping moments between Arjun Sen and his doctor Deb and between Arjun and his daughter Reya, and yet the audience is never likely to feel it’s all about ‘moments’ strung together.
Shoojit captures the free-flowing, unpredictable rhythm of life with tremendous feeling. He lets us share his wonder of life with a grin and a grimace. How has he done this? How has the director succeeded in keeping a film about a terribly life-draining illness from being morbid and depressing?
Of course, the incomparable cinematography by Shoojit’s regular Avik Mukhopadhyay helps give a truly universal resonance to Shoojit’s pitch-perfect panacea. The lighter moments are not brought in as comic relief. Even Johnny Lever is not trying to be funny here. He is just that guy you know who will scream at you for spoiling his Sunday with one more health setback. It’s his way of keeping spirits high.
The profoundly moving movie is decked with luminosity, not the least of it being trackable to Abhishek Bachchan’s incredibly immersive performance. The two girls, Pearl Dey and Ahilya Bamroo, who play Bachchan’s daughter Reya at two different stages of the character’s life, are precious discoveries.
Most precious of all is the film’s underlining theme: don’t take even a second of your existence for granted.
How did Shoojit did this? Is he the finest filmmaker of our cinema? At the moment it seems like it. I Want To Talk must have some flaw. Right now, I can’t see it.
