Alternative Entertainment

ALTERNATIVE ENTERTAINMENT: “I WANT TO TALK” AND EMOTIONAL IMAGINATION

by Anup Singh March 17 2025, 12:00 am Estimated Reading Time: 5 mins, 21 secs

I Want To Talk redefines emotion in Indian cinema, breaking away from mainstream conventions to offer a deeply immersive experience where viewers actively shape character depth through imagination and subtle storytelling. Anup Singh writes…
Shoojit Sircar’s I Want To Talk is a groundbreaking film that challenges mainstream Indian cinema’s reliance on high-pitched drama, offering a nuanced and introspective approach to storytelling. Featuring a powerful performance by Abhishek Bachchan, the film invites viewers to engage deeply with its characters through evocative silences and unspoken emotions. By prioritizing the who over the what-why-when-how, I Want To Talk transforms audience perception, making them active participants in shaping the film’s emotional landscape. With its striking cinematography, high-contrast lighting, and thought-provoking narrative, the film stands as a bold statement against formulaic storytelling, solidifying its place in the evolution of Indian cinema.

Aesthetic Choices and the Challenge to Mainstream Sensibilities
With I Want To Talk (IWTT), we now have a means of measuring both the triumphs and failures of Indian mainstream cinema while also recognizing its present-day debasement. For example, the embellishment of emotional commitment to religious iconography is just one of the craven devices used to avoid finding a more respectful way to reach the viewer.

It takes a conscious effort to appreciate what Shoojit Sircar’s film is proposing, but making that attempt is the only way to dislodge the loudspeaker through which much of mainstream cinema speaks to us. The reason I Want To Talk matters is that it impresses an alternative sensibility onto what has long been established as "emotion" in mainstream Indian cinema. While this sensibility remains committed to the pull of emotion, it is not tethered to the high pitch demanded by the mainstream.

High-emotion situations are foundational to mainstream cinema. Paradoxically, though, this heightened pitch of emotion often results in a kind of emotional stuntedness. This happens because the breadth and nuance of emotion are not only ignored but actively spurned. Taking a markedly different path, I Want To Talk builds itself upon a couple of exciting and provocative aesthetic choices.
First, through a meticulous selection of scenes and facts that a mainstream film would typically ignore (such as the detailed medical procedures), the film brings viewers to an exceptionally engaged sense of empathy with the main characters. Second, the film frequently and abruptly ends scenes at points where viewers might typically expect characters to begin explicating their motives—elucidating the why-how-where-when of their life choices or explaining backstory details.

The caesura this creates in the film’s exposition, as one realizes over time, is deliberate, as it happens repeatedly. What this caesura does—given that by this point the viewer is deeply engaged with the characters and their rhythms—is impel the audience to imagine what the characters might have said. Because this process is speculative, the possibilities of what the characters might have expressed become infinite. In other words, the viewer actively participates in shaping the character’s depth, achieving an emotional richness that no amount of exposition or high-dramatic speech could have accomplished. Ultimately, this engagement saturates the film with a largesse of feeling.

A Departure from the Norm: The ‘Who’ Over the ‘What’
There is a quiet chiding here of the entrenched theologians of mainstream cinema—those who insist on treating viewers like children, constantly feeding them information so they ask no questions or think for themselves. To fail to take note of the aesthetic choices in I Want To Talk is to unwittingly admit that we remain trapped in the shadow of the mainstream, caught in the forward thrust of a film rather than experiencing the quiet flowering of its moments.

In fact, as we become more aware of the dull and degraded nature of mainstream cinema’s commitment to high-pitched drama, the more we realize the need to delve deeper into Indian cinema’s history—to recover filmmakers like Bimal Roy, for instance—and appreciate the new ground broken here.

High-emotion situations exist everywhere in I Want To Talk, but they are subject to a deliberate process of being broken off or cut. This, in turn, delimits the dramatic surge, allowing it to unfold in different rhythms within the viewer. However, the sudden verbalization of deeply personal emotions—like the daughter's confession of being split between two homes—demonstrates that the film is not rigidly bound to a single aesthetic. Instead, it allows for moments of revelation where unexpected depths in a character open up the film, granting that character their own infinity.

Whereas an extension of high-emotion scenes in mainstream cinema would drag along the "what-why-when-how," I Want To Talk remains steadfastly with the "who." In today’s world, the "what-when-why-how" often define and control our perspective, while the "who" is reduced to a statistic. This dehumanization is evident, for example, in news reports on Gaza, where the horror lies in the anonymity in which the "who" is buried. I Want To Talk reminds us that the "who" is always far more than we assume—that the "who" is all of us, each yearning to speak our lives as we live them, imagine them, and shape them.

Abhishek Bachchan has, in previous films, foregrounded his performance as much through his body (as in Guru) as through the mobility of his face. Here, however, he has tempered his facial expressiveness to allow a slouch of the shoulders, a laxness of the arms, a hesitant gait, or a sluggish gesture to convey the experience of a body that has been cut, scraped, broken, tied, and screwed together over twenty times on the operating table.

The high-contrast lighting of the film enhances this effect, often obscuring the face in shadows or darkness so that only the traumatized silhouette of the body emerges—resonant with unconcealable emotion.

Watching I Want To Talk is not unlike getting to know a friend over a lifetime—where tiny gestures, small choices, or even throwaway words reveal deeper layers of their character. Near the end, one realizes that the bond was not necessarily built on affinity but rather on the fact that this person—like this film—made the journey of life more fun, poignant, ridiculous, and, ultimately, marvellous