+ Christmas Eve In Miller's Point
I Want To Talk Is A Lyrical Film About Death & The Gift Of Living
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Shorn of metaphor and allusion, Shoojit Sircar's I Want to Talk is a prosaic portrayal of what it takes to live and how much it takes out of us to survive, writes Ishita Sengupta. |
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EVERYTHING about I Want to Talk feels incredible. The setting is a town in America and the foreignness of the land is amplified by its casual anonymity. Several scenes are staged inside the cold premises of hospitals; mentions of death punctuate most conversations yet in the two instances in which people die, the news is ferried, almost unceremoniously, by phone calls. No less incredible is the makers’ decision to release the film in theatres, a space dictated by market trappings with more urgency now than ever before. The only thing that fits is the name of the director: Shoojit Sircar.
An easy way to surmise Sircar’s legacy is to acknowledge that no two films made by him are alike. It is, however, also a peripheral remark and reductive in essence. A more accurate approximation would be that not only are his films different from each other but they are also unlike most Hindi films. Across his close to two-decade career, he initiated and cemented a sort of uncompromised filmmaking which feels radical in its persistence. The sublimity of his craft uplifts the mundanity of life. As a result, the playful premise of a sperm donor became a thoughtful portrait of masculinity, and an old man’s nagging complaint about constipation sensitively outlined the difficult relationship between a child and their ageing parent. In that sense, his recent film is more tangible in its theme — centring on death but unravelling as an affirming tale of life. Shorn of metaphor and allusion (well, not completely), I Want to Talk is about the grime and gift of living. It is a prosaic portrayal of what it takes to live and how much it takes out of us to survive. It is about a man who refuses to give up and by charting his journey, the film culminates as a granular estimation of how much is really needed to keep breathing. The unsentimentality of the suggestion is matched by the filmmaker’s unsentimental treatment where he abstains from designing the story of a man’s will to live as that of him thwarted by an unkind blow of fate. Anyone else would have told the story of the latter but if there are two ways of looking at things, Sircar has forever chosen to look at the side of bearable lightness. |
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Christmas Eve In Miller's Point: The Charming Anti-Fiction Of Festive Gatherings
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Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is a personal and naturalistic portrait of the holiday season.
Rahul Desai reviews.
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| Cast: Matilda Fleming, Maria Dizzia |
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ESCAPISM is the default language of Christmas movies. Fiction is the refuge of festive-season stories. Miracles happen. Love blooms. Kids win. Parents panic. Over the years, though, this genre has mutated into a Hollywood supermarket product decked with cheap artifice and gift-wrapped for easy snacking. But Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is a welcome escape from that escapism.
The film is essentially a series of nostalgic vignettes at a Long Island Italian-American house. Three generations of the Balsano family are together — and it’s chatty. It’s basically 100 minutes of The Bear’s famous ‘Fishes’ episode if it were a gentle non-narrative night of revelry and low-stakes tensions. The story is rooted in the sheer lack of it; the film trusts the inherent, invisible and inevitable social machinations of voices, minds and egos meeting once a year. The men smoke cigars in the garage and discuss — argue about — a care home for their ageing matriarch. The teen cousins (which includes Martin Scorsese’s daughter, Francesca) get bored and sneak out to ‘rebel’ in the snowy town with their pals. The older cousins deliver tipsy speeches that aren’t half as profound as they imagine. The partners of the family members are amused by this annual circus of chaos. Two poker-faced cops keep an eye on the streets while concealing their feelings for each other. Everyone just exists. Watching the film is not only like being invited to a big Christmas weekend, but also like — to quote The Office’s Andy Bernard — being in the good old days before you’ve actually left them. The nostalgia is actually tinged with melancholy: this is possibly the last Christmas at the ancestral home before it’s sold. The characters look like they’re living in the memories of those who are trying to remember that final weekend years later. It’s all a bit foggy, full of sensory moments that seem to have accumulated into surreal approximations of themselves over time. You can tell that the prickly moments have been edited out by the mind, and that the night is a blur of moods and vibes. The tedium of it all is humanised by hindsight — a bit like Aftersun without the heart-crushing heaviness. It reminded me of how I often try to remember the last New Year’s party in my childhood colony before we all moved on, only to arrive at a hazy assortment of nights instead. The point is nobody knew it’d be the last one in the moment. All that remains now is a whiff of deodorant, a stray riff of Aqua’s 'Barbie Girl', a snatch of winter chill, the passing smell of chocolate cake.
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