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own heart pumping as I walked in that hospital lobby with Dan.

The sections of the lm where Dan befriends the comatose girl’s family vaguely resembled Kumail Nanjiani’s Big Sick.

However, the resemblance is purely cosmetic. Deep down, October is a resolutely original exposition on love as de ned by the rites of mortality. The characters are vividly etched and the credit for their rsthand accessibility must partly go to the wonderful actors who come together to act out Sircar’s ode to the idea of love.

An Offbeat Ode To Love

October

STARRING Varun Dhawan, Banita Sandhu

DIRECTOR Shoojit Sircar

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In a lm where everything can go wrong for the characters, there is almost nothing that the director does that can even remotely be considered wrong. Shoojit Sircar understands and empathizes the pulse of the working class, their fears and anxieties, whether it’s about abundant sperm count (Vicky

Donor) or constipation (Piku). In October, it is death and mortality that bind the characters in a clasp of compassion, not in any obvious way, but in the way the universe conspires to keep their world from falling apart.

Juhi Chaturvedi’s writing is so lucid that I felt I knew rst-hand all the characters who populate her wondrous world of alchemized pain. The plot is about a seemingly obnoxious hotel-management trainee, played by Varun Dhawan, who decides that the shy colleague Shiuli (debutante Banita Sandhu) who has gone into a coma has some kind of a bond with him.

Unsure of that thing we call love, Dhawan’s Dan simply lives on the idea of love, extolling its idealism to a point where his existence is de ned by one casual three-worded question that Shiuli asked her colleagues before she slipped into a coma.

The scenes in the hospital that follow, the distress of Shiuli’s family of mother, sister, brother and an insensitive uncle, is so cogently mapped in the narrative I could almost hear the sound of my

This is a deeply meditative, melancholic drama lled with resplendent visuals of trees shedding leaves and owers almost as if they were crying over the loss of love. The narrative is denuded of all elements of hysteria and melodrama. Studied and yet spontaneous, Sircar’s outstanding grip over his narrative and characters is reinforced by the camerawork (Avik Mukhopadhyay) that celebrates the pulsating allure of nature and life while all around us, things fall apart and mortality seeps into our soul. Dhawan’s deep understanding of what makes a character as seemingly overbearing as Dan brings out his sensitive side. His performance also navigates the lm’s simple yet elegant structure through a maze of life-transforming experiences which convey the unexpectedness of life as it suddenly swerves into death.

Subhash K Jha