The director of discovery and poignant subjects like Piku or October here presents “I Want To Talk”-a film based on the life of a cancer survivor. This time, it deals with Arjun Sen’s life (played by Abhishek Bachchan) a successful marketing professional who get diagnosed of multiple cancers overnight.
Arjun starts with some reluctance to take his fate in the hand but rise in him to fight the disease and stands up against it. But there is more to be mended than his body. Arjun’s family life is also a disaster; he is a divorcee and shares a complicated relationship with his daughter named Reya portrayed by Ahilya Bamroo who thinks that he is faking his illness for attention. His career becomes about not only reconstructing his body, but also about building a new life for himself which means mlending his fractured relationships.
Arjun isn’t a likable hero. He is just plain rude, self-centered and there is something rather Machiavellian about him at times; it is difficult to be on the man’s side to start with. Although it can be said that he wants to conquer his struggles very much from the beginning of the film, as the told story advances, the desire of the main character seems quite sincere. Several at times the movie portrays Arjun’s challenge in simple yet very sensitive moments as he, for instance, jocularly tells his wife that he is ‘gutless’ after a surgery operation.Set in India, loosely on the life and book of the actual Arjun Sen, the script by Ritesh Shah attempts to do this on an introspective level but in terms of narrative. But that is about it For much of the time The writing at times feels surface level as opposed to deeply felt The kind of which is associated with the director Shoojit Sircar.
Despite the touches of humor and the magical realism at play, this really does come across as an awful lot like viewers are watching an extended, visual self-help book that never quite resonates on the necessary emotional level.Indeed, with Abhishek in the picture, the role that requires scraping of the stubborn, possibly self-serving outside to reveal an insistent, unyielding inside is apt.
The actor loses the last grain of self-indulgence to get into an intricate role seamlessly. While he does appear to be the part, he at least tries to sell what is actually being said. Leaving the parental home, becoming a daughter of two fathers, a young Ahilya offers him interested companionship. The film comes into existence when the daughter fails to lift up her father. Johny Lever performing the role of the helpful maintenance worker, Kristin Goddard as the cheerful nurse and Kriplani as the friendly surgeon have been planned to offer some striking aspects of life that Arjun can see with variance.
Shoojit once told this journalist that the kind of treatment he puts in whatever subject he chooses to explore, he does a doctorate in it. However, the beauty of research-based art is that it is best presented when hidden in the background, as is done in the current case. Here it is calm as a grave, or loud as a neon sign. Soon, I Want To Talk becomes R.Balki in letter and spirit where self-consciousness gets in the way of reality and the film begins to preach like a Oprah Winfrey show with pictures.
