With ‘I Want To Talk’ (IWTT) we now have a means of measuring the triumphs of Indian mainstream cinema and its failures, and to recognize its present-day debasement where, for example, the tarting up of emotional commitment to religious iconography is but one of the craven devices utilised to avoid finding a more respectful way to reach the viewer.
It takes a conscious effort to appreciate what Shoojit Sircarʼs film is proposing, but that attempt is the only way we can dislodge the loudspeaker that much of mainstream cinema speaks to us through.
Why ‘I Want To Talk’ matters is that here we see the impressing ofan alternative sensibility on what has been established as emotionin mainstream Indian cinema. While this sensibility remains committed to the pull of emotion, it is not tethered to the high pitchdemanded by the mainstream.
High emotion situations are foundational to mainstream cinema. Paradoxically, though, this pitch of emotion goes hand in hand witha kind of stuntedness of emotion. Simply because the width, the nuance, of emotion is not only left ignored, but spurned.
Taking quite a different path, ’I Want To Talk’ builds itself on a couple of exciting and provocative aesthetic decisions.
One, through a meticulous choice of scenes and facts that a mainstream film would particularly ignore (the details of the medical procedure, for instance), the film brings the viewers to an exceptionally engaged sense of empathy with the main characters.
Two, the film constantly and abruptly ends the scene at the point where viewers usually expect a character to start explicating his or her motives, elucidating the why-how-where-when of their lifechoices or start explaining any of the other details of the back-story.
The caesura that this creates in the story’s exposition, one realizes after a while, is deliberate because it happens again and again in the film.
And what this caesura does is that - engaged acutely as the viewer is by this point with the characters, with their rhythms and senseof duration - it impels the viewer to imagine what the charactersmight have talked about, what might they have said. Because this isbut speculation, the possibilities of what the characters might have said are infinite. In other words, the viewer is now creating the character with a density that no explanations or high dramaticspeech in the film would have achieved. All this emotional imagination of the viewer, in fact, helps to saturate the film with a largesse of feeling.
There is a quiet chiding here of the entrenched theologians of mainstream cinema with their dogma and creed of treating viewers like children and feeding them constantly so that they ask no questions or think for themselves.
Failure to take note of these aesthetic choices in ‘I Want to Talk’ is an unwitting admission that that we stand unmindful in the mainstream’s shadow, caught in the forward thrust of a film rather thanthe flowering that takes place quietly moment to moment.
In fact, as we become more and more aware of experiencing thedrama of exposition and its commitment to high-pitched emotionas dull and degraded in mainstream cinema, the more we realizethe necessity to delve wider into Indian cinema’s history andrecover filmmakers like Bimal Roy, for example, and muster to see then the breaking of new ground achieved here.
In point of fact, high-emotion situations are everywhere in ‘IWTT'ʼ, but they are subject to an obdurate process of being broken off, of being cut, in one stroke delimiting the surge in drama & allowing it to play out in other rhythms within the viewer.
I would like to point out, though, that the sudden verbalization of the intensely personal, like the daughter’s about being split between two homes, shows that the film is not built dogmaticallyon an aesthetic, but that depths unsuspected in a character canand do open the film to give the character his/her infinity.
While an extension of the high-emotion scenes (divorce, father- daughter conflict, self-as-consciousness and as body in conflict) would in mainstream cinema drag the ‘what-why-when and how’ init’s train, ‘IWTTʼ stays with the 'WHOʼ.
In our time, the ‘what-when-why-how’ define and control our perspective, while, often, the ‘who’ ends up a statistic (we simplyhave to read newspaper reports on Gaza to be faced by the horrorof the anonymity in which the ‘who’ are kept). ‘IWTTʼ reminds us that the ‘who’ is always much more than we thought, that the ‘who’is all of us and we all want to speak our life as we live it, imagine it and what we will make of it.
There are some films before this where Abhishek Bachchan has foregrounded his performance through his body (Guru) as much through the mobility of his face. But here he has moderated the face’s expressiveness to allow a fold of the shoulders, a laxness ofhis arms, a stuttering saunter or a slumbering gesture to play thepart of a character whose body is cut, scraped, broken and tied andscrewed together at least 20 times on the operating table.
The high contrast lighting of the film also helps to hide as much as it shows: often the face is almost completely lost in shadows or darkness. Just the traumatized silhouette of the body emerges - resonant with unconcealable emotion.
The experience of watching the film is not unlike getting to know a friend over oneʼs whole life - at different moments tiny gestures, choice of a different path, and even throw-away words reveal a little more about the friend. Near the end, one realizes that thefriendship was based not necessarily on affinity, but because he or she made the journey of life so much fun, poignant, ridiculous and marvellous.
Anup Singh is a well known, Geneva based filmmaker.
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