October ***
Dir: Shoojit Sircar. With: Banita Sandhu, Varun Dhawan, Gitanjali
Rao, Sahil Vedoliyaa. 115 mins. Cert: 12A
Director Shoojit Sircar doubtless spent many hours in plush
four-star hotels promoting 2015’s intriguingly low-key Piku, and the experience has inspired a film that initially threatens
to be a near-Rossellinian departure for the Indian mainstream. For once, the
focus isn’t on those jetsetters swanking around rooftop pools, but the youngsters
cleaning up after them for a minimal wage and scant health benefits. That last
detail proves significant, given that October
interrupts its careful survey of the Radisson New Delhi’s intern program when
the dedicated Shiuli (Banita Sandhu) tumbles from a balcony, leaving her
heavily brain-damaged.
What follows, however, is a sometimes shaky, perilously
one-sided romance, pitched between sombre Big Sick and full-on weepie. As the moody, irresponsible Danish (Varun Dhawan) steps
up, scattering night jasmine blossoms around Intensive Care in a bid to rouse his
colleague from her vegetative state, there’s a whiff of Nicholas Sparksness –
take this as recommendation or warning, depending on personal taste. Either
way, Sircar’s regular screenwriter Juhi Chaturvedi has to work overtime to try
and persuade us why the once-erratic
Dan should have started playing Doogie Howser, beyond the general sentiment it
might be a nice thing to do for a girl.
Matters are steadied, just, by Sircar’s quiet sensitivity towards
tiny signs of life. Welsh-born Sandhu is the obvious beneficiary – not least
when the film provides a welcome explanation of how the comatose Shiuli’s brows
remain so on point – though the attentiveness may also enshrine Dhawan as Hindi
cinema’s most Goslingesque pin-up. The course change Sircar proposes for that
cinema remains honourable, and if October
feels more tentative than Piku, which
had those rock-solid star turns to ground it, its emotion is at the last earned
honestly: any structural wobbles will likely be nothing compared to the
audience’s lower lips come the finale.
October opens in cinemas nationwide today.
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