It is hard to categorise October as a movie, other than the obvious choice of bracketing it in the ‘will blow you away’ genre. Dubbing it anything else is a disservice to the filmmakers and those designated with personifying the very symbolism that the movie stands for.
Yes, it is a love story. Yes, there is fall in love. But it is neither the fall, nor the love, that one is accustomed to – especially viewers of South Asian cinema. For it is a love story that merges into a coming-of-age epic.
It has humour that won’t make you laugh out loud. It has emotions that won’t make you cry buckets. But you will laugh and you will cry.
It is every bit inter human experience as it is intra. October is just October – simply breathtaking.
The writing of Juhi Chaturvedi of Vicky Donor and Piku fame is flawless. It achieves all that it sets out to do - and then some
Dan (Varun Dhawan) and Shiuli (Banita Sandhu) are trainees at a five star hotel – acquaintances, coworkers, but calling them friends would be a stretch. Dan is bratty, irresponsible and moody, but with his heart in the right place, and Shiuli is pragmatic and determined to excel.
A freak accident puts Shiuli in a coma, and jolts Dan who is unable to think beyond the fact that the person he daily interacted with might not get to live again – in the non-medical sense of life. After finding out that her last words were ‘Where is Dan?’ he takes it upon himself to breathe life into her again.
Symbolism oozes from every frame that is used to shoot October – each New Delhi spot, the hotel backstage, the hospital wards, the rented home, the city roads and the railway track.
There is a perpetual clash between uncompromising idealism and unrelenting pragmatism, between hope and despair, between life and death.
The interactions between family members, coworkers, roommates, strangers, everything is seamlessly ‘everyday’. And it is this simplicity that is precisely what makes October simply unique.
In this regard, the roles of the two protagonists was going to be especially critical – not only the characters that they were tasked with playing, but also as the restrained custodians of the jigsaw that would have fallen like a pack of cards had it not been handled with care.
Banita Sandhu excels in a demanding role, where she is assigned the daunting challenge of personifying life on the brink. She is convincing and does not put a foot – or an eyeball or spinal cord – wrong.
The difficulty level for Varun Dhawan lies in exhibiting a different kind of restraint, as the twenty-something young man discovering life, and himself, having no clue about the metamorphosis he’s undergoing.
Varun Dhawan and Banita Sandhu
The writing of Juhi Chaturvedi of Vicky Donor and Piku fame is flawless. It achieves all that it sets out to do – and then some – without overwhelming the audience’s experience of life unfolding in front of them. It is unlike anything that she has done, despite both her previous endeavours winning Filmfares. And it is arguably unlike anything anyone has done in Bollywood.
The direction of Shoojit Sircar – also of Vicky Donor and Piku fame – is perhaps even more immaculate. For he has the task of carving out the unparalleled from everyday life that has been scripted for him. And he does so, in every gauged shot, every measured dialogue, in everything that happens in between, and in releasing October in April.
To reveal the symbolic heart of the film here would be a spoiler greater than any whodunit – it would murderous itself, for the feel, the aura, the life that October creates.
But it is autumn’s bloom. The smell of hope that you live with, when everyone around you calls something completely different, life.
