On 2 years of @ShoojitSircar’s #October – here are some (okay many) thoughts I had on the revisiting a truly special film #2YearsOfOctober.
Shantanu Moitra’s score, Shoojit Sircar, Juhi Chaturvedi’s writing, Avid Mukhopadhyay’s cinematography and Chandrashekhar Prajapati’s editing all came together beautifully to create.. a feeling in a film which felt like a distant memory but one many of us will always cherish.
When we first meet Dan, he’s is childish and immature, irritable and entitled, with a permanent victim complex. He hates his job and thinks he deserves better despite him not willing to put the work in and prove himself
leading to constant clashes with his manager (so perfectly played by Prateek Kapoor). He’s like a whining child, just coasting along, refusing to approach things with sincerity and focus
He finds Shiuli to be nothing more than an irritating colleague, out of a sense of jealousy. He resents her for being good at her job. I’m guessing it makes it even more irritating for him that she never lashes out at him or complains despite how badly he treats her
which makes him act out even more. There’s a warmth and kindness to her (Banita Sandhu in a role you just can’t get out of your head) and she seems to be one of the only people who tolerates him, and maybe even feels bad for him.
And she’s always there, around him somewhere. Even when she has no dialogue in a scene, she’s always somewhere in his vicinity. He constantly feels her presence even when he doesn’t acknowledge it.
Theirs is such an interesting and delicate connection – they don’t particularly know each other, nor is there an obvious attraction between them, but there is a basis of this kind of dormant connection which might never amount to anything,
Or, with the right catalyst, could evolve into something more.
And then, in a moment, everything changes when she falls.
And then, in a moment, everything changes when she falls.
As we see the ambulance roll in and jet her off to surgery, I found myself wondering why they focused so much on the medical detailing and bloodiness of it all. Maybe to highlight the authenticity of the experience?
When he first walks into the hospital after finding out what happened to her, Dan is like a kid in a new theme park, looking around dazed and fascinated. I imagine he’s never been to a hospital.. or certainly not to one quite like this.
This is where you start to see the naïve, childlike simplicity to him – the very thing that allows him to go the lengths that he does to care for her and put his life on old with such ease, consequences be damned. I argue it’s a kind of childlike purity to aspire to.
The look on his face when he first sees her hooked up to the 19 tubes (he counts them) – and the sheer shock of seeing someone who was always in his periphery, in this state
- I’d put money on the fact that this is the first time he truly sees her and gives her an iota of importance and recognises her as significant. Cut to the hilarious next scene when he and his flatmate are confidently discussing the tubes in her and what purpose they serve
- a charming take on how we as Indians will never quite admit we don’t know something and we must forever assert our expertise in areas we have no clue about.
But this sees the start of a turning point for Dan. Gradually things begin happening to him that he doesn’t quite understand. He knows he needs to be there by her side, and he can’t stand not being there. It’s the only thing he knows and he can’t not do it.
I’ve seen other reviews distil this down to ‘he was a lost boy who needed purpose and now he found one’ but it’s so much more than that. Sometimes things consume us that we don’t quite understand, we just know them to be things we have to do.
In the next scene when he arrives at the hospital late at night, the nurse asks him if he’s Shiuli’s boyfriend or family and he says he’s neither, so she asks him why he’s there – a question even he doesn’t really have an answer to, he just knows that he needs to be.
In the hospital we meet Shiuli’s family, her mother played by the fantastic Gitanjali Rao and sister played by the young Iteeva Pandey whose performance doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
We get no flashbacks of either of them with Shiuli, so we don’t quite know what her relationship was like with her family, but it’s safe to assume it was strong.
We see the two of them fall into the monotonous routine of hospital life where your entire day to day is shaped around the hospital as the financial and emotional burden grows.
And then Dan finds about those three words that make him feel like his being consumed by caring for her is instantly validated – ‘Where is Dan?’ – Shiuli’s last words before she fell.
The idea of those words and what they could mean is all he needed to submit himself entirely to his cause of her betterment.
I love the scene just after he interrogates his friends about whether Shiuli ever spoke about him, where he sits in her car, still parked at the hotel, and just tries to feel her presence again.
These are the moments that make you think back on every moment he, and by extension we, got to spend with her before she fell which leave you wishing you could’ve spent more time with her.
October marks Varun Dhawan’s best performance till date, he entirely makes Dan his own and capitalises on his own childlike qualities. I love his silly lovable adventures around the hospital, giving us all much needed comic relief.
Whether it’s his tiff with a prying uncle outside the hospital who offers to take his message inside, or the asking random medical questions to the receptionist just for general knowledge
or asking the nurse to keep Shiuli’s uncle seated as far away from the ventilator as possible so he can’t literally pull the plug.
But despite how badly he wants her to recover, whenever he’s around her in the hospital, despite her state, Dan is never emotional unlike those around him. Almost as if this is just how he knows her, or this is the version of her that’s become significant to him.
Dan is such an interesting character, despite how strongly he feels for recovery he’s never confrontational or aggressive. When he sees a ward boy stare at her, he calls him out but without aggression.
When Shiuli’s asshole uncle continually talks of pulling the plug, Dan always responds softly, not with anger but with kindness, hope and logic. He’s not looking to make a scene or attract attention to himself or be given importance, he just wants to be there and care for her
As he devotes more of his life to the hospital and is becomes more consumed by his need to be there for her, he increasingly starts to drift away from real life, his job and friends.
So much so that they begin to call him out on it because they don’t understand what he’s doing or why for someone he never gave a second thought to. And why would they? This isn’t a thing to understand, or one that follows any sense of logic.
It’s something he just has to do with every fibre of his being, because he must.
In one scene his manager Asthana sees him sleeping in the laundry room, but, for the first time, he doesn’t shout at him. He begins to feel sorry for him and recognises that he’s going through something that can't really be explained or reasoned with.
As a result, what he becomes in the hospital is the very opposite of what he was at the hotel. He’s helpful and sincere, diligent and acutely caring for those around him.
We get the first sign of progress in Shiuli’s recovery when Dan collects her favourite flowers – perhaps the only discernible detail he even knows about her before all this -
and keeps them by her bedside which begins her gradual journey back to consciousness. Ironically, the very first time we see Dan cry isn’t a moment of pain, it’s one of hope, just after Shiuli first opens her eyes for the first time.
Their equation and what they feel for each, and more importantly why, is the film’s biggest mystery. Is he only there because he believes she cares about him and that in turn makes him care for her? Does that make it selfish? Does that make him delusional?
When she appears to recognise him after she opens her eyes, does she recognise him as Dan or just a familiar presence who’s never left her side? And if she truly does care for him, has she always done or is it only a result of his time caring for her at the hospital?
He gives up so much of himself under the assumption she cares about him and we never know whether that’s based in any sort of truth because we don’t know what she’s thinking.
Personally, I think it’s all true, and whether it’s based on question marks or not, it doesn't make their connection any less real or significant
When Dan is at his lowest point having lost his job, his mother visits the hospital, forcing Shiuli’s mother to feel like she’s disrupted Dan’s life and taken advantage of him somehow.
Leading to the film’s most interestingly shot scene where we she confronts Dan, but we never see his face, only the outline of his reflection, as she says the three words that define the next chapter of his journey ‘You go Dan’.
I don’t quite know why he agrees and doesn’t fight, perhaps because it’s coming from Shiuli’s mother. Anyone else even suggesting such a thing wouldn’t be met with such silent obedience.
He goes to Manali to take up a new job under the recommendation of Asthana. He’s no longer the same careless employee he was. He’s capable and caring makes a genuine effort to make something of himself.
But while he’s permanently surrounded by the commotion of his new job and the silence of Manali, his mind is still very much in that hospital by her side.
It’s here we feel the most pain for him, despite the fact that he’s doing well for himself and moving on, he knows he isn’t where he needs to be. When he hears she’s not doing well he does the only thing he knows to be right, he returns to her side, promising never to leave again
And she seems to respond to his presence. Again, we can’t be sure, only go with our own beliefs. But I know what I believe.
But there’s a difference in him now after he returns from Manali, a distinct confidence in his actions, as if he’s done questioning the why of his actions and just submitting to his cause entirely.
Maybe it’s because she’s at her most conscious so we can see the real her, not merely the idea of her, but this final leg of the film after she’s discharged, is the most romantic.
We see him care for her at home in every waking minute and start feeling hope, in wondering ‘what if there’s a life to be had for them? What if they could have a life together?’ Despite knowing deep down what’s coming.
He goes home one evening after spending the day with her and has a dream that’s she waiting for him outside his door, only to be woken up by a call we know is coming. She’s gone.
Few things force you to grow up quite like pain. Dan isn’t what he once was. But what now? How do you process an experience like that?How do you make sense of life happening to you in quite that way? What happens when your reason for waking up every morning is no longer with you?
Despite his pain, there is a sense of silence acceptance in him, as if he knew this was coming.
After her death, while they’re all sitting at the table in one of the final scenes, her brother asks about whether he should go to tuitions to which his mother says ‘you must’.
Life must go on. What he’s left with before her family moves back to their hometown is their Shiuli tree, which he takes, because again, he knows he must.
