OCTOBER – The melody in melancholy

Is there a particular colour for sadness? While a sombre mood is more often than not painted in grey, what if it is represented in white?

When white, a colour that reminds people of purity, peace, calmness and tranquility, is used to portray loss, grief and sadness, the resulting melange of sorts is October, a movie written by Juhi Chaturvedi and directed by Shoojit Sircar.

While watching movies, the relatability factor is an important factor in determining its effectiveness.

In full-blown commercial potboilers, farther the relatability from the proceedings on screen, the better it is. In the opposite end of the spectrum are movies that make one completely empathise with the characters.

Then, there are movies like October, where the audience can juxtapose one’s own real-life experiences and probably sit together with the leads after the movie and exchange notes.

October‘s story is simple. Danish ‘Dan’ Walia (Varun Dhawan) plays a hotel management trainee who is irritable, tired and feels his potential is being wasted(Basically everyone who works on night shifts). Shiuli Iyer (a brilliant debut by Banita Sandhu) is his over-achieving colleague who is fast moving up the pecking order.

Their lives intertwine irreversibly after a freak incident leaves Shiuli in a comatose state.

This one-liner has enough potential to be taken to any narrative plane and the path chosen by Juhi and Shoojit is the reason why October works so effectively.

The film avoids giving details about their lives before the ‘incident’. Was there a friendship that ever existed between Dan and Shiuli? Did Shiuli harbour a crush on Dan? Did Dan look at Shiuli as anything but an over-achieving South Indian who is more of a threat than a friend?

There are no clear-cut answers and this could have been a hindrance to accepting the tectonic shift in Dan’s attitude when he starts being around her in the hospital every single day, especially when it throws off the most important question of them all —Why is Dan doing so much for someone he barely knows? He doesn’t know that she is the daughter of an IIT professor, has two siblings and her father passed away 10 years earlier.

He probably doesn’t know anything about her except that she was now in a coma and the last words she spoke on that fateful day was “Where is Dan?”

However, is there a universally accepted and a fixed reaction to adversity? Some fight, some laugh, some cry, some fume and then there are some like Dan, who thrive.

Dan, a perennially negative influence in his workplace, transforms into this brooding bundle of positive energy in the hospital and that could be the reason why Shiuli’s amma Vidya Iyer (a restrained and excellent Gitanjali Rao) doesn’t mind this overbearing colleague.

Even when Dan snaps at Shiuli’s uncle who suggests euthanasia, Vidya doesn’t do much except look fondly at this kid who seems to be giving her the required push to fight longer in the battle to save Shiuli.

The Shoojit-Juhi duo deliver some of the best devices to show time jumps. Growing hair, reducing intensity of scars, Dan’s boss giving him a shouting down, Dan’s knowledge of medicines and medical terms getting better, Dan’s friendship with the nurses(choked up listening to that off-handed dialogue by the Malayali nurse) and the usual trope of blooming flowers and withering autumn.

October is an emotional movie, but walks a fine line to not become a manipulative tear-jerker.

It is interesting how Dan is there almost in every other frame with Shiuli but he somehow misses out on every landmark of her recuperation. Was this the filmmakers’ ploy of keeping him at a distance but close enough for the audience to get invested in a character on the right side of the weirdness spectrum.

There’s one particular scene where Shiuli is attended to by a stylist who threads her eyebrows at the insistence of Dan. This is an intrusion of privacy and subjecting someone else to personal beauty standards. But, Shiuli’s job as a hotel management trainee required her to be well-decked always and since Dan seems to have not seen her during any other times, it can just be his belief that she would have liked it that way.

Can Dan make that choice for her? Obviously not. But when there are discussions on pulling the plug, Dan is someone who tells Shiuli’s family that he doesn’t believe she wants to be dead yet.

Dan is a complex character. There is no method to his behaviour except for the blind determination of seeing the ordeal through. The underlying beauty of this character arc is his inability to see it as an ordeal itself.

October is elevated by Shantanu Moitra who has clearly understood the need for such a movie to be cleverly interspersed with music and silence. Avik Mukhopadhyay’s cinematography shows the grimness of a hospital and the quiet bustling of a five-star hospital with equal elan.

With the movie’s technical team delivering impeccable frames, the acting calibre of the leads ensures October becomes an exposition of why romance can never be boxed in any particular category.

The performances of the leads and strong supporting characters like Shiuli’s family and Dan’s friends add an unfathomable sense of comfort in this 115-minute movie.

In a movie that is filled with a bunch of talented debutants, the tag of the standout performer will have to be given to the actor who was also part of movies like Dilwale and Dishoom — Varun Dhawan

Making a commercial movie like the aforementioned ones is no easy task either, but Dan is a role that strips Varun off his affable charm and goofiness. The last time he tried something like this(Badlapur), he was in an even earlier stage of his career and  Nawazuddin Siddiqui almost took the entire movie away from him. Mentions about Varun’s histrionics in Badlapur was more often than not added as an afterthought after heaping plaudits about the genius of Nawazuddin.

In October, Varun as Dan walks away with the cake because this was not expected of someone whose last movie was Judwaa 2. If for instance, say a lesser visible but a talented actor like Vikrant Massey was cast in the role, it wouldn’t have been a jolt in the gut, because it would just seem like a different dimension to his Shutu from ‘A Death in the Gunj’.

Bollywood is still a long way away from making movies where this jolt is not necessary.

Varun for the most part of October manages to pull off a convincing Dan. There is a beautifully flawed uniformity in his portrayal of Dan whose slouched shoulders, inability to keep eye contact and indecisiveness makes him endearing for some and exhausting for others.

For all its positives, October is certainly not a ground-breaking movie or Bollywood’s answer to “See, we can do so many things, why should we stick to making sequels to Hate Story and Race“.

It is just a movie that made me think of the petrichor that wafted in the air just before the rains poured to camouflage the tears that came running down after a break-up. It reminded of the characteristic smell of a hospital from the time I walked into an ICU to see a kin prepped up in pipes and tubes. It was a reflection of the time I walked into a mortuary to see someone very close lying motionless and not responding to the wails outside. It is a movie that talks about the eventuality of life but doesn’t harp on its uncertainties. It is less of a movie and more of someone’s personal diary that doesn’t mind someone else adding a few remarks on the side and filling the blank pages.

Once again, a special mention to Juhi Chaturvedi and Shoojit Sircar for making a movie about a love that is difficult, sad, depressing, unrequited but still lending it the required gravitas to not make it creepy and disturbing.

October is not a one-of-a-kind movie.  It is just that, like Shiuli, the night jasmine flower, Bollywood’s acceptance of such attempts is also seasonal. Just like how the flower has a mystically alluring fragrance but has a short lifespan, Bollywood might herald such anomalies but not for too long as it ultimately reverts to the machinations that run the Hindi cinema universe.

However, the fight is on and after Badlapur, Varun has chosen October as his answer or at the very least a glowering stare to the ‘mainstream entertainment’ machinery that has eaten up many an actor and forced them to act according to its whims and fancies.