The biggest hurdle in the uphill career of Abhishek Bachchan is his father, Amitabh Bachchan. It is perhaps the biggest uphill task for any actor functioning in Indian cinema. Yet, this young man who has been stumbling, hopping, limping and walking on a long road filled with rocks and stones and pebbles all the way, has finally found the role of his life in I Want to Talk directed by Shoojit Sircar.
For a six-feet-something, tall and very handsome young man, it has been a game-changer to constantly metamorphose to a somewhat paunchy, man with the upper body filled with an ugly scar post surgery, protruding chin, jaw and teeth as he keeps journeying from one scary surgery to the next. But Abhishek has done what might seem impossible, finally shaking off the living ‘ghost’ of his legendary father. He plays Arjun Sen, a marketing genius who is constantly debating on the pros and cons of the word “manipulation” which lies at the core of all marketing strategies but says he does not like the word at all.
The character of Arjun Sen is sourced back to the real-life Arjun Sen introduced to us at the end of the film, smiling into the camera with his protruding jaw broken into a flashing smile. I Want to Talk is inspired from Raising a Father, a memoir written by Arjun Sen in 2009. Sen wrote it as a Christmas gift for his daughter Raka Sen.
The book focuses on Sen's relationship with his daughter beginning with when she was eight years old. The real Arjun Sen is an America-based Indian professional marketing person who produces adverts to encourage people to buy products they might or might not need. His joys rest on the sterling success he has in pulling off his acts of persuasion. Or, is it ‘manipulation’, which he hates yet practices without being aware of it?
Almost all films featuring characters suffering from terminal cancer are filled with soppy, sentimental, teary scenes dotted with ample melodrama. Hrishikesh Mukherjee portrayed a positive face of a terminal cancer patient in Anand but in retrospect that too, had its fair share of melodrama and exaggerated sentimentality.
I Want to Talk is different. Arjun Sen, a marketing genius, breaks down almost completely when the doctor gives him just 100 days to live. His personal life lies around him in ruins. His divorce is almost at an end and his only daughter, eight or nine, visits him only for certain days of the week. So, basically, he must meet the challenge of his limited life all by himself. He decides to manipulate his life and extend the limited time the doctors have given him to the span any normal person has.
So, Arjun Sen begins to ‘manipulate’ himself in every which way he can, to break the time-span of 100 days his doctors have given him. He ‘manipulates’ the entire medical fraternity he needs to communicate with to convince him into getting into one more surgery which may or may not succeed at all and he copes with his loneliness as he does not wish to communicate with his ‘visiting’ daughter because she is too small to confide in. But the confused little girl is forever eager to try and understand what exactly her father is going through.
Arjun’s continuous visits to the hospital for treatment, diagnostic tests, medical tests, surgeries and so on, brings a new friend in his life in the shape of Nancy, (Kristine Goodard) Arjun’s nurse whomnot only saves him from his first and last suicide attempt but also develops a close, emotional bonding with him. Though his meetings with Nancy are few and distant in terms of time, the bonding is almost tangible and offers one more outlet for his loneliness he hates to share with his growing daughter.
The other love-hate relationship he has is with his chauffeur (Johnny Lever) when Arjun is no longer driving himself. It is a wonderful comeback for Lever in a different cameo, forever flustered with a boss who wants to do everything himself. This hints subtly that when one is alone, the definition of “family” can change to include what one may consider to be complete “outsiders.” We never see the wife as she is not important in the scheme of things.
Pearl Dey as the little and confused Reya and Ahilya Bamroo as the grownup Reya with a mind of her own, fit themselves in beautifully into the celluloid life of their screen father Arjun while Jayant Kripalani as Arjun’s regular go-to doctor-cum-friend is brilliant in a cameo.
The first half of the film when it is filled with the series of complicated and life-threatening surgeries Arjun needs to go through tend not only to drag a bit but also add a dose of morbidity to the scenario especially with the large close-ups of Arjun when he lying on the hospital bed, either being prepped for surgery or recovering from it.
But the second half of the film, specially when Arjun’s aged parents arrive from India and are deeply disturbed by Reya’s lifestyle which Reya takes as a needless intrusion into her privacy, are filled with small doses of humour. Angry, she once shouts at her father complaining about this intrusion saying that next they will be asking her if she is pregnant. Arjun listens quietly and then asks, “Are you?” and she stomps off angrily. The social values of an American-born-and-bred Indian teenager with a boyfriend her father hates comes across quite well.
The music is low-key and subtle without a sad note and used very economically along the run time of the film. Arjun’s home is structured like the typically well-appointed but not well-looked-after appointment lived in by a getting-into-middle-aged Arjun who begins to look practically ugly with a scarred paunch he does not hide, a protruding jaw which takes away from his handsome looks and who accepts every radical change in his life and looks with an air of calm acceptance and without anger or rancor.
The entire film has been shot outside Los Angeles in California where the cast and crew lived for three long months and the shooting took around 35 days if counted at a stretch. This has vested the film with a ‘foreign’ feel especially in the relationship between the father and the distraught daughter, besides the ambience, the place setting and last but never the least, the mystery of how the expenses for the long series of surgeries are being met with as Arjun Sen is not shown working to earn an income for a living anymore. The silent hint is that perhaps his medical treatment is being financed, at least partially, by the ad firm he worked in.
To sum it all, I Want to Talk is not just about a celebration of Arjun Sen's tenacity to not get to the finishing line in hell, hospital and humour but more importantly, the title is traced back to Reya who wants to talk to her father about the inner and outer pain that dots his entire life and not to Arjun.
The film talks about how communication between a father and a little daughter can stop without the older one realizing that it is mandatory for a little child about what precisely is happening in her father’s life to prepare her for the worst or not the worst, whatever the result might be.
The way Abhishek Bachchan cheerfully shed his handsome screen image and barters it for a paunchy, middle-ageing man suffering from terminal cancer not to die of it but to live through 20 surgeries and top it with a marathon jog is unforgettable and deserving of a plethora of awards. This is his most unforgettable and incredible performance ever. Thank you for such a lovely film Shoojit and company.