Love is never found while swinging beside a tree singing a song. It is natural and happens eventually. The film October by Shoojit Sarcar tries to depict the same. The movie is away from the regular melodramatic ones and has quite a different note. Its a slow but intriguing love story, where the proposal never happened but its quite clear.

The film is named October because of the significance of the flower Shiuli in the film. Shiuli is known as night flowering jasmine. These fragrant flowers blossom at dawn and die by the dusk. The scientific name of this plant means sad-tree because these flowers lose their brightness during daytime.

Directed by Shoojit Sarcar, written by Juhi Chaturvedi, the film tries to depict something similar in a life of a girl. Banita Sandhu as Shiuli does justice to this role. For a debut role, she has performed very well in a very different and a difficult role.

The Story Line

Shiuli is a hotel management trainee at Radisson Blu Delhi. She's quite intelligent and knows her way around the work. Varun Dhawan as Dan is another trainee in the same batch as Shiuli. Dan has performance issues and can be called as troublemaker for both the hotel and himself. Dan is a few years senior than Shiuli and gets repeated warnings from their superior. Dan is unhappy that he's in the same batch as Shiuli and thinks he's anyway better than her.

On a new year's eve, Radisson Blu is packed with guests and no leaves are allowed to the trainees. Dan, being rebellious by nature, takes a few days off during this time to attend a family function. After all the hard work, these trainee friends enjoy new year's eve on an open balcony. They notice that Dan hasn't been around for quite a few days. At the same time Shiuli asks about Dan while trying to sit on high parapet. The parapet being wet due to the dew, she falls down from 3rd floor of the building to the ground.

She is taken to the hospital where doctors find that she has a huge chunk of blood clot in her brain and she might never return to her old state again. When Dan returns, he is shocked to see her in such a state. He suddenly gets concerned about her and makes several visits to the ICU. After a few days he learns that Shiuli asked about him just before she fell down. This brings all the feelings inside Dan. Curiosity fills his head which pushes him to be beside her until she gets better. Shiuli goes into coma and doctors ask her family to take decision if Shiuli should live or not, as there's very little chance of her survival. Dan insists that she lives and convinces Shiuli's mother to give her more time to recover.

Time passes by and the month of October comes. Its the time when night-blooming Jamine flowers fall down on ground. Dan picks them up and takes them to Shiuli who's still in ICU. As Shiuli liked night-blooming Jasmine Dan brings her handful of flowers. Shiuli, for the first time after accident, shows sign of physical movement which brings positivity to the movie. Shiuli eventually recovers from the state of coma and but loses her body's proper functionality. She goes through seizures which brings panic among doctors and family.

During this time Dan has been paying less attention to his work and career which ends up drastically. He gets himself fired from Radisson Blu. Shiuli's mother realizes that she has been selfish all this time not asking Dan to focus on work, but she acknowledges that Dan has been strong as a pillar and because of his positivism Shiuli is out of coma and alive. Dan finds a new job as hotel manager at Shimla where he seems to be performing very well. Shiuli, in the meantime, misses Dan and doesn't co-operates with nurses and doctors.

When Dan hears about it, he decides to come back and stays with Shiuli until she recovers completely. Shiuli is eventually discharged from the hospital and taken back home. As soon as the movie moves in the direction of happy ending, Shiuli dies due to heart attack. After her death, Shiuli's mother moves back to Trichy.

Throughout the film, Dan goes through an emotional journey after the unfortunate incident with Shiuli where he finds love in one of the strangest ways possible. Shiuli, on the other hand never says that she loves Dan but tries to express her feeling to Dan many times during the film.

Hope is strongly presented in the film. The whole movie is based on hope. Not just the audience but the characters in the film also hope that everything will be better

I expected the song 'Theher Ja' by Armaan Malik to be on the film, but the movie doesn't have any song in it, which is in a way, an unconventional style of direction, but the movie becomes monotonous. Throughout the film, I wanted to know what's going to happen next, the curiosity was always there, but it was like waiting too long for an orgasm, and in the end it doesn't even happen.

Surprisingly, everyone is writing 'good-good' about the film, but I feel that the film is not everyone's cup of tea. You need to have that bent to understand and appreciate the movie. Away from the regular ones October might not be appreciated by the crowd looking for a typical love story.

Box Office Numbers

According to the report by www.boxofficeindia.com, Due to the niche content and limited audience, October had low opening day with ₹ 4.5 - ₹ 4.75 crore net. The growth jumped up by 55% on second day as the film grossed ₹ 7 crore and ₹ 8 Crore on the third day. By the end of the third day, October managed to grab ₹ 19 crores from box office.

P.S.: The views expressed are personal in nature.