A Deepa's Request

Spoiler: This review is complicated, long and boring. Read at your own risk.

Not many films can claim the title of a good DVD movie. The cinema hall has its own charms and mechanics. 100 people laughing on a bad joke, makes it a good one, and makes another 50 who did not get the joke, join in with the laughter. Watch Singh is Kinng or Bheja Fry (otherwise good cinema hall/multiplex movies) at home on your DVD player and they’d suck more than anything in the history of cinema or in the history of sucking.

Let’s Talk, on the other hand, is a movie you shouldn’t be caught dead watching in a cinema hall. Random farting noises, people chatting, people stupidly laughing, phone buzzing and kids shouting – that screws any fun you can extract from the movie. This movie is a private one, to be enjoyed in the concealed and intimate sphere of your home, preferably with a friend who is not into gay Bollywood movies and/or is empathetic towards basic human emotions (mind me, these are two very conflicting qualities – if someone digs gay Bollywood shit, then s/he lacks a functional brain area that distinguishes howling from weeping and donkey crap from cat pee). 

Moving on, I genuinely appreciate two sincere features of the movie – (I) its attention to emotional detail and (II) its subtle, un-exotic Indian-ness.

The movie starts with a surreal sequence of fade-in, fade-out, overlapping and merging shots of love letters written between Nikhil (Boman Irani) and Radhika (Maya Katrak). There is a surfeit of those letters flowing through the reels of the movie and you miss 90% of what’s written on them unless you pause play repeatedly to catch them in still-frame. I paused every 2 seconds in that sequence and personally checked out each letter. They were frighteningly authentic and made you want to write like that. Be rest assured though as all important letters last for a good 8-10 seconds on screen and have punch-words highlighted in bold (-> horrific attention to detail). 

Even though the movie is in the English language, it is modeled on Thumri, an Indian folk song form, usually sung in the admiration of Lord Krishna, and consists of some basic lyrics repeated in a song each time with a different emotive undertone. If you know this, then you begin to understand a lot of allusions and symbolisms used in the movie.

Theme: Radhika is pregnant with a child who is not from Nikhil (her husband) but from the interior designer of their new flat. Radhika while lying wide awake next to her husband in bed imagines Nikhil’s different reactions, in Thumri- inspired style, when he would be woken up by Radhika to fact that he was cheated. Hence, the name of the movie – Let’s Talk.

Nikhil-Radhika dialogue and Nikhil’s reaction sequences form the most part of the movie and the latter range from evincing overt anger, denial, and passive-aggression to love, disrespect and pretension of maturity and intimacy. These sequences are heroically rendered into the reel by Boman Irani, and subtly acted out with a constant feminine grace by Maya Katrak. Though they are cinema debutants in this movie, they look rather seasoned actors and are spontaneously comfortable in front of the camera. A definite result of the theatre experience.

The movie dwells on and explores two premises namely, (I) the more you know and love people, the less sure you become about their supposed reaction in such delicate situations and (II) men are basically weird creatures, especially post-marriage.

The movie is a cinematic testament to the maturity of the director and script-writer Ram Madhvani, for acing often ill-directed subjects of pre/post marriage love and promiscuity.

However, Let’s Talk does have its interspersed fault lines. Nikhil’s character in the movie is heavily incoherent from the impression one gets after reading the letters he addresses to Radhika and that frustrates the viewer somehow. Also, there is no real plot to follow or characters to explore in the movie as most of it is shot in a single apartment. Moreover, the pace of the movie lags and gets out-of-sync with the story as nothing is actually happening in the movie, and everything is going on in Radhika’s head. Production values, to mention for the sake of it, suffer slightly.

Ignoring a few blemishes, this movie is a carefully crafted melting pot of human emotions.

More than introducing me to the seemingly placid but internally passionate world of married couples, Let’s Talk has reinforced my belief in Leonardo Da Vinci’s popular quote – “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”. Nothing communicates better in cinema than simplicity. If you want to disagree, I’d be happy in handing you over a copy of the book called as ‘The Old Man and the Sea’. After reading that, you can lick my butt till kingdom come.