Gandhi Talks Review: Underwhelming

The fact that a major studio put out a silent film starring some of the biggest names in the industry in these concerning times for the film business is the one big takeaway from Gandhi Talks, notes Arjun Menon.

Kamal Haasan and Singeetham Sreenivas Rao took Indian cinema by surprise in 1987 with their experimental silent film Pushpak Vimana. Indian filmmakers have been largely averse to considering the vast risks associated with the form of silent cinema, where images are supposed to deliver compact, self-contained stories.

Karthik Subbaraj tried a gutsy modern-day version of the ‘silent film’ some years ago with the horror thriller Mercury. The challenge of making a silent film in this day and age is profound, where streaming platforms mandate additional exposition and voice-over in their content, in hope of retaining the ever-dwindling audience attention spans.

What is Gandhi Talks really about?

The makers of Gandhi Talks (a film which was made back in 2023 and finally got its theatrical release now) have pushed themselves against the wall by centring such an exposition-heavy screenplay into the famously unforgiving, concise vessel of a silent film.

The film follows Mahadev (Vijay Sethupathi), a jobless man who is just a bribe away from landing a sustainable job at the Mumbai Municipal Corporation. He stands to represent the dreams and aspirations of the nation’s youngsters being trampled on by merciless corruption and systemic indifference.Gandhi, both the name and the face on the minted currency notes, has become a death knell on the lives of the least common denominator in an economy, where capitalism reigns supreme.

Mahadev, in between his many personal woes, has a lover named Gayathri (Aditi Rao Hydari), who finds herself in the precarious position of being forced into an arranged marriage.

On the other hand, you have a rich, spoiled businessman ‘Boseman’ (Arvind Swamy), who, due to some unforeseen turn of events, lands himself in some financial trouble.

Fates clash, and paths cross, with Mahadeva coming face to face with Boseman. Wrong assumptions are made, and Mahadeva mistakes the rich man entering his life as some sort of one-way free ticket to paradise.

Does the Silent Cinema treatment work in Gandhi Talks?

This is the perfect setup for a wordless romp about class critique and a satirical takedown of the affluent class. But the film uses these interesting character details as bouncing boards for infuriating character choices that make the cumbersome interpersonal dynamics even more complicated.

Much of the context and life of such a caricaturish creation lies in the writing and filmmaking’s ability to transpond an ocean of feeling into a tangible platform for suspense generation.

The director Kishor Pandurang Belekar is assured in his dedication to the bit — to make a wholly silent film set in the modern world, albeit with some compromises. He uses the vague blueprint of Pushpaka Vimana and goes off on his own idiosyncratic odyssey.

However, Gandhi Talks is not the austere, creative stunner like Kamal Haasan’s timeless outing, as the film is pleased with its own subversive central formal choice and is trying its best to make up for lost ground with little hacks and cheats in mitigating the lack of verbal exposition. The film is clearly not as well thought-through as the Singeetham Sreenivasa Rao classic.The director here started with the noblest of intentions and found the perfect assortment of central characters and events to support his intentions, but the dense, information-heavy nature of the script translates to a sort of caught-in-the-middle silent film exercise, which uses text messages and hand signalling as a crutch.

Gandhi Talks: The Performances

Vijay Sethupathi is expertly cast as Mahadeva, who has to express through his empathetic eyes. The simmering, infectious energy in the actor’s physicality does a lot of heavy lifting as his levity legitimises the issues of the common man hero, who is woefully caught in a moral conundrum, with the confusion playing out around him like a ticking clock.

Gandhi Talks would have looked a lot less cooler with a lesser actor. Vijay Sethupathi humanises the struggles and gives us a glimpse into the wheels turning inside his head as he embarks on each character beat.

Aditi Rao Hydari and Arvind Swamy get the assignment, but their physicality takes time to mould into the snappy poetry warranting such wordless emoting, as opposed to Sethupathi, who feels like a natural in this mould. A R Rahman lends life and grace to the confusing, broad comedic segments.

But the film loses momentum towards the latter half and runs out of good ideas. The subversive love angle, which started out with a meta wink to the kind of filmic romantic relationships, ends up being quite formulaic in its conclusion.

Each gag is turned into a grandiose moment with Rahman’s fleeting score adding to the tension and humanity in between the gaping holes in the writing. There are unnecessarily long, overdrawn stretches set within a palace that feels too derivative and meandering. The filmmaking isn’t sharp enough, and you feel the gags pile up with diminishing returns.

The one major takeaway from Gandhi Talks

Gandhi Talks does not reach the noble heights it’s gesturing to, but it’s an outlier in a media industrial complex oversaturated with ‘content’ and ‘compromised visual barrage’ of information and noise.

It is a welcome sight to see a relaxed, operatic silent morality drama play out. The unrelenting pace and divisiveness of the social media bubbles also affect our media consumption choices.

There is a clear intent to attempt to bring back an ever-relevant, layered mode of cinematic storytelling that rightfully prioritises images over an avalanche of distracting immicks.

The presence of top stars in such genre experiments might very well be the one thing that can reignite the love and passion for a formal choice that shows more than it hides in plain sight.