I believe Sircar’s ability to make light of difficult situations and present it unembellished is what makes his work nestle into our hearts. His “low-budget look,” his shakey camera, his imperfectly lit scenes allow us entry into the emotions he is presenting. He does so with tactfully written dialogue and a plot that, well, isn’t really a plot. It develops, moves, swims and he simply takes us on the journey. His way of telling stories elecits emotions that we want to box up and take home as a parcel. When the going gets tough, we like to take them out, air it out, feel it, and put it back in. His movies feel safe, warm and comfortable.

I Want to Talk makes you feel uncomfortable. Arjun Sen, an advertising bigwig is suddenly diagnosed with laryngeal cancer. Life as he knows it comes to a startling halt. The months following his diagnosis are excruciating, between surgeries and divorce proceedings, Sen loses almost everything. His house, his wife, quality time with his young daughter and his ability to talk. The film follows Sen’s life as he moves from cancer to cancer, surgery to surgery, withstanding it all.

The film has Shoojit Sircar written all over it and not just because of the dad-jokes. In it’s comedic tone, it’s rough treatment and honest performances, Sircar’s finest characteristics as a director are front and centre. However, the film lacks connection. By the end of it, I found myself not caring for a man who went through 20-odd surgeries. That’s not right. I think the script is at fault.

Spoilers ahead.

We do not get more than 10 minutes with pre-diagnosis Arjun Sen. When he collapses after coughing up blood, we think of the typical archetype of an invincible man who crumbles due to the unexpectedness of life. And if the film had continued in this vein, we would have believed it. But Arjun Sen, as we slowly discover, is in fact a funny person, who didn’t just ignore his family and work himself silly. He isn’t the typical “advertising bigwig” that we thought, he is, and has always been human.

The film failed at establishing a foundation for his character. For telling us enough about him before his diagnosis so that we could feel something when he did get diagnosed. His character and characteristics were told to us through a series of Chinese whispers, I felt. Scenes that rather unclearly connected with each other and, as a result, drew a vague picture of Sen’s characer.

Sircar seems to be in love with father-daughter duos. In I Want to Talk, Sen’s relationship with his daughter is perplexing. She seems completely ambivalent to her father’s sickness until the end, where she joins him as he valiantly tries to complete a marathon after a life of ill-health. (Yet another Sircar motif. Remember Bhaskor Chakraborty in Piku, cycling to his death?) But what he does, extremely successfully, is make sure that we as an audience understand that when the going gets tough, it will pass.

I Want to Talk is based on the real-life story of Arjun Sen. A man who got over 20 surgeries and lived on various medications through his life. If a man like that, we think as an audience, can go through hell and still crack a joke, we have hope. Abhishekh Bacchan as Arjun Sen is excellent. Simply excellent. The son of Amitabh Bacchan is no longer the son of Amitabh Bacchan, he is his own actor. He surrenders to the role with such grace that we forget who the actor even is. He forgoes vanity, fame, screen-time and simply does his job, act.

A special mention to Johny Lever who lights up any screen he walks into. He needs nothing, just his face.

I am hesitant to say that I Want to Talk tried to live up to the legacy that Piku left behind. Hesitant because it is a completely different film. Saying it nonetheless because it had all the same markings. The father-daughter duo, the life-altering illness, the humour, the honesty and let’s not forget, the theme track which sounded hauntingly similar to the Piku sarod theme that everyone is madly in love with. However, it still is a film with a gentleness that only Shoojit Sircar can bring onto screen. And for that, I will give it a chance.

Premise: Bajirao Singham, played by Ajay Devgn, is roped into the plans of Zubair Hafiz, the grandson of Omar Hafiz, a Pakistani terrorist. Singham’s wife, Avni played by Kareena Kapoor, is kidnapped by Zubair’s forces and is taken to Sri Lanka. Here Singham’s partners in crime, Shakti Shetty (Deepika Padukone), Satya (Tiger Shroff), Simmba (Ranvir Singh), Sooryavanshi (Akshay Kumar) and Daya (Dayanand Shetty), come together to rescue Avni in true action movie fashion.

The hook of Shetty’s box-office-blockbuster is the parallel he draws to the story of the Ramayan in his film. Sita’s abduction in the myth is equated to Kareena’s kidnapping, Singham takes the role of Ram, his trusty right-hand man Lakshman is Satya (Tiger Shroff), for comic relief and additional support we have Simba as Hanuman, Daya as Jatayu and Shakti Shetty as Sugriv.

On paper, there seems to be no reason why these parallels would not work. Using mythology to enhance a story gives a film a sense of grandeur and rootedness. But Shetty makes an irresponsible decision. He uses the epic as a gimmick. By writing loose dialogue and careless scenes, the parallels he wants to draw between the epic and his cop story become predictable and cold. One could pass off these creative decisions as moments of misjudgement, however Shetty time and again proves that he is not writing dialogue for the film but is expressing his own personal ideology on current affairs.

Take for instance one of the first scenes in the film. Devgn’s character, Singham, is riding through the mountains of Kashmir when he meets his old nemesis Omar Hafiz played by Jackie Shroff. The two get into a scuffle resulting in Hafiz’s arrest. When Devgn turns around he sees a crowd of Kashmiri youth walking towards him. He seems unsure as to how these young boys would react to Hafiz’s arrest. From among the crowd a boy steps foward and says ‘stone pelting is a thing of the past. This is now naya Bharat, naya Kashmir.’ Shetty is no longer talking from within the cop universe, he is talking as a director who is aware that his films are feeding the populist agenda. That is dangerous.

Apart from my personal feelings about his ideological choices in the film, the making of it too is disappointing. As many critics have noted, this looks to be one of his laziest films yet. What action films are known for; larger than life heroic entries of the main characters; Singham Again is unable to pull off. The actors’ entries are inspire no awe, no hooting and no cheers. Shetty’s coveted action sequences fall absolutely flat with choppy editing and quite frankly, not-so-cool moves. The two scenes I did enjoy were both picturised at Satya’s or Tiger Shroff’s Kalari institute in the forest. In the scenes, Shroff was dynamic and made you want to cheer him on.

The acting was, *sigh*, tiring to watch until Ranvir Singh as Simba entered the screen. His comic timing was truly comic relief. He lit up the screen with his exaggerated Marathi accent and loud facial expressions; the kind of ham acting Rohit Shetty’s films have perfected. Ajay Devgn in the leading role was…a bore. Arjun Kapoor as Zubair Hafiz was dragged down by his full-faced beard and unclear attempts at Urdu and Akshay Kumar, yeah, there was more of his helicopter in the film than him.

Deepika Padukone as Shakti Shetty does make you want to let out some hesitant hoots (a woman in uniform unleashes a different kind of crazy) but the sound drowns out quickly when you see the representation of South India on screen. Padukone’s character works at a police station in Madurai, Tamil Nadu. But the background of her entry is filled with Mohiniyattam dancers from Kerala, Chau dancers from either Purulia or Mayurbhanj, and Pilli Nalike dancers from Karnataka. Is this poetic license or just gross misrepresentation?

Ultimately this film raises a few important questions. Should “massy,” commercial cinema not be held accountable for its creative decisions? Should we not have higher standards for them? Or should we let them off easily because they are massy?

If after reading this review your question is; why did you even go and watch the film? Well, it’s because the idea of watching a multi-starrer with some of the biggest actors in Bollywood seems so exciting. The proposal of an Indian Avengers universe is really cool. It is a valiant thought. It makes young audiences want to fall in love with a superhero while munching on their over-priced theatre popcorn. It could push more audiences back into theatres. It fulfils something. But in the hands of Rohit Shetty? I think I would rather not.

Hear me out. This isn’t a black or white, reel friendly opinion. Nor is it me trying to troll Sharmeen Segal’s acting prowess or lack thereof. It is an attempt at actual criticism on the internet. 

Heeramandi follows the story of the tawaifs of Heera Mandi, a real-life bazaar of entertainment located in Lahore. It chronicles the lives of a group of performers whose home is the reputed Shahi Mahal. When the British arrive and establish their political alliances with the nawabs of Lahore, the business of Heeramandi begins to crumble. Meanwhile, the revolution for Indian independence is in full-swing. The lives of these tawaifs are caught helplessly in between. 

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The potential for this story was massive. Really, massive. The series spans across almost 20 years, from the 1920s to 1947. It is told through eight 45-50 minute episodes of pure opulence. That is what is communicated clearly from the very first shot to the last shot; this story is that of riches. The clothes are phenomenal, the jewellery is exquisite, the set design is really something to marvel at and so are the compositions of the shots. I expect nothing less from Mr. Bhansali. But the story is difficult to watch. 

The first episode opens with a young Mallikajaan, played by the inimitable Manisha Koirala, asleep on a chaise lounge with her newborn child. Her sister and head of Shahi Mahal, Rehana Begum, played by Sonakshi Sinha, comes in at midnight and steals her younger sister’s newborn child. This is the inciting incident that sets off generations of trauma within the walls of Heeramandi. The first episode sets the tone for what is about to follow: a series of scenes crafted to showcase one exceptional shot and not for the story. I know it sounds harsh, but that is what I noticed. It is not that the story is difficult to follow, it is that the scenes that tell the story, most often than not, don’t have a logical reasoning. This was my feeling for the first 4 episodes of the series; a lot of exposition, followed by more exposition, followed by more exposition with little to connect them to the larger story. And even though we have had almost 4 episodes of exposition, somehow, new pieces of information sneak into the storyline even in the last episode. You sit there thinking “oh I didn’t know Lajjo aapa, who I have been watching from episode 1, had an opium addiction,” or “oh, Phatto, who is one of the main supporting characters in the series, her full name is in fact Fatima and not Phatto,” which by the way you find out only in episode 8. 

The pacing of the series feels rushed; big story arcs which need an equally big buildup are given one scene, characters arcs are given a few moments to change course and let’s stay away from talking about how quickly our two “main leads,” Tajdar and Alamzeb, fall in love with each other; in true Hindi movie fashion, it is with one look, yes. The shots are without a doubt absolutely stunning, but the story held me more when the shots weren’t actually as beautiful. 

Not to be a purist but a series about skilled performers and dancers really needed some skilled performers and dancers. What the camera was able to achieve while shooting the dance sequences, the performers brought down with their dancing. Had the series not been about tawaifs this point would not have mattered, but since we are talking about women who have legendary performance history, the training makes a difference. 

I’ll be honest, the idiosyncrasies of the time, I fell in love with; the language, the adab or politeness, the salam upon greeting someone, bidding adieu with “allah hafiz,'' they were all world building techniques that definitely succeeded in establishing a mood. Whether they were historically accurate or not is besides the point in my opinion. While watching you could smell the roses that Mallikajaan stuffed into her blouse so that she stayed perfumed for the entire day or the attar that Lajjo sprays before she leaves the house. The little dots of mehendi on their hands were stunning details that the show needed. But while it succeeded in making sure I would like to smell, see and hear Heeramandi, it didn’t convince me that I needed to watch the show for it. 

It's difficult handling a period piece like this that is told through only 8 episodes. The world, the time, the kind of mood Bhansali wanted to capture, and constantly wants to capture, is unfortunately not mini-series friendly. However, I think the OTT series format really does suit his work. He has the luxury of going into unending detail about the things he is most obsessed with; beauty, beauty, beauty. Speaking of, Aditi Rao Hydari, Manisha Koirala and Taha Shah Badussha are wonderful in the series. I had forgotten how Koirala shines on screen. She gave life to an on-paper simply cruel and vindictive Mallikajaan. Hydari as the silently brave Bibbojaan is made for period films, her genes made her that way and what a delight Badussha is as the principled Tajdar on screen. 

Would I want to watch Heeramandi again? Not really. Do I now want to smell of rose perfume though? Definitely.