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Release
date:
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April 13, 2018
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Director:
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Shoojit Sircar
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Cast:
Language:
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Varun Dhawan,
Banita Sandhu, Gitanjali Rao, Ashish Ghosh, Isha Chaturvedi, Sahil Vadoliya,
Prateek Kapoor, Nimmi Raphael, Shekhar Murugan, Iteeva Pandey, Karamveer
Kanwar, Rachica Oswal
Hindi
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In tone, apparent
intent and the nerves it touches, this week’s Bollywood release October brings to mind Althaf Salim’s
2017 Mollywood film Njandukalude Nattil Oridavela (An Interval In The Land of Crabs), a low-key entertainer about a
family grappling with cancer in their midst. It requires immense finesse to
treat such a subject with humour, yet not be insensitive or gross. In another
setting and with another theme, October
manages to do just that.
When the mother’s
diagnosis was revealed in Njandukalude,
I remember thinking: “What kind of jerk makes a comedy about cancer?” The
answer came by the end of the film: the sort who understands the inexpressible,
inexplicable aura that envelops us when tragedy strikes and life seems to come
to a standstill yet goes on, with all the accompanying smiles, tensions and
tears; the sort who understands that it is possible to affectionately laugh at
people’s quirks without mocking them or their circumstances.
Like Salim, writer
Juhi Chaturvedi and director Shoojit Sircar are “that kind of jerk”.
Their October draws us into the world of a
young hotel management trainee in Delhi called Danish Walia a.k.a. Dan (Varun
Dhawan), a somewhat silly, impetuous, immature, angsty, antsy, exasperating,
good-hearted know-it-all that you cannot help but love. He is, when we are
introduced to him, a 20-something man-child skating on thin ice with his
employers for all too frequently exploding at irritants that in professional
circumstances require icy “the customer (or the boss) is always right”
detachment.
Dan does not do detachment
well. And so, when his colleague Shiuli Iyer (Banita Sandhu) slips into a coma
after a freak accident, he finds himself far more disturbed by the calamity
than even her best friend. Shiuli was/is a nice girl, but hardly his closest
buddy. Dan cannot get his mind off her though when he discovers that her last
words before she was injured were, “Where is Dan?”
October is a mellow drama shorn of conventionally filmic
twists and turns. It is tough to explain because it needs to be felt. Through
its running time of less than two hours, it shares with us the bonds Dan
develops with Shiuli’s mother and siblings who are strangers to him until this
personal ordeal brings them together, the support offered by those around him,
the effect Shiuli’s condition has on his work and more.
It is a film that
appears to say little while saying so much. It is about the prospect of
bereavement bringing out facets of us that we did not know existed. About the
loss of someone whose relationship with you has not – or not yet – been
socially defined. Dan is asked more than once whether he is Shiuli’s boyfriend.
If not father, brother, boyfriend or husband, then what? Must he be one of
these to mourn her?
How can he explain
that she was his what-might-have-been, the quiet classmate who was possibly
interested in him while he was too dense to notice? In some ways his struggle
to put a finger on his feelings and his inability to articulate them brings to
mind Devi in Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan (Hindi,
2015) grieving the death of the boy with whom she had a brief amorous tryst in
a seedy hotel room, a chap to whom she was no one in society’s eyes but who
felt like someone to her.
As were Vicky Donor (2012) and Piku (2015) – both Juhi
Chaturvedi-Shoojit Sircar collaborations – October
too is a sharply observant film about small joys, small conversations and
empathy. As much as it is about its overriding theme, it is also about that
hospital employee who chats intimately with a patient’s friend late one night
because he hangs around so much that it feels like they know each other well;
the mother who can confide in this boy she only just met, more than those who
have known her all her life; the uncle who does not realise that his
well-intended pragmatism about Shiuli could hurt those closest to her.
It is about friends
whose frustration with you rivals their fondness. It is about how different
people cope differently when life throws curve balls at them, and realising
that Ishani who asks Dan, “Kuchh zyaada
hi affected nahin ho raha hai tu?” (Are you not getting too affected by
Shiuli’s accident?) may love Shiuli no less than Dan who replies, on seeing his
gang go about their lives as if it is business as usual: “Tum log itne unaffected kaise ho?” (How come you are so
unaffected?)
The success of October’s writing and acting lies in the
fact that each of these people is so utterly real, and the story so utterly
relatable.
The best cinema
reminds us of our own life experiences even when our scripts do not literally match.
I confess that the night after watching October,
I tossed and turned in bed for hours before waking up in tears, remembering
difficult questions about a beloved relative that once confronted me in what
now seems a lifetime ago. Of course I am not Dan and this is not the same
thing, yet October causing those
emotions to well up inside me is an indicator of its resonance with realities
other than its own.
Like Chaturvedi and
Sircar’s previous team-ups, this one too marks a new turning point in Bollywood,
where the lines between offbeat and mainstream are continuously blurring. As
much as we celebrate such an experimental film coming from a financially
successful director, it is worth celebrating the fact that an actor as
hard-core commercial as Varun Dhawan has chosen to star in it. In a filmography
dominated by the likes of Student of the Year (2012) and Judwaa 2 (2017),
it is interesting to see Dhawan stirring the mix at this early stage of his
career with riskier ventures like Badlapur (2015) and this one.
Sircar is good for Dhawan. The
director mines his leading man’s innocent charm well for this role, and Dhawan
himself makes every effort to efface his starry swagger and trademark
cutesiness to play Dan. There are fleeting moments when the latter does peek
through in his dialogue delivery, but for the most part the actor hits the nail
on the head with his performance.
Casting director
Jogi deserves a trophy for finding October’s
outstanding supporting actors. Banita Sandhu
deserves another for rising to the challenge of playing a character who, for
the most part, has nothing to do but be motionless. In the few minutes we get
with Shiuli before she is bed-ridden, Sandhu ensures that we like her enough to
stay invested in her till the end, and later brings alive even that frail
creature lying helpless in bed.
October is that rare example of a film in which every
single actor is remarkable, every single character memorably written and acted.
While each one has stayed with me, a special mention must go to the fabulous
Gitanjali Rao who plays Shiuli’s mother Vidya Iyer, an IIT professor and single
mother.
As you watch Dan repeatedly messing up on the job, it is hard to
believe that a five-star hotel would retain this troublesome fellow as long as
Radisson Dwarka holds on to him, but Chaturvedi’s writing and the acting by the
lovely Prateek Kapoor make Dan’s immediate boss Asthana so believable, that
even that improbability comes across as probable.
October is not a film in a hurry, its pace entirely
mirroring the painstaking healing process that Shiuli goes through. Seasons
change, Avik Mukhopadhayay’s camera closes in on tired faces and moves
back to capture pretty pictures of a city that is a lot more than the “concrete
jungle” stereotype now attached to urban spaces.
Sircar gives
us time to take in the enchanting detailing he offers: the bougainvillea tree laden thick with pink blossoms in a
splendid full frame, the mother whose demeanour in the classroom does not
betray the trauma she is dealing with back home, a Delhi that is far more
multicultural than most Bollywood films set here seem to realise. The Malayali
nurse (Nimmi Raphael), the Bengali neurologist (Ashish Ghosh),
the Tamilian professor explaining why her daughter has a Bangla name – their
presence makes October far more
representative of the real Delhi than Punjabi-obsessed Bollywood usually
acknowledges.
Sircar’s latest
film is a sweet-sad-funny saga of love, loss and coping. It has been many hours
since I watched it and I am still lost in its poetic realism.
Rating
(out of five stars): ****
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CBFC Rating (India):
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U
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Running time:
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116 minutes
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This review has also been published on Firstpost:
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