October – How Bollywood can learn from this Film
There comes a film once in a while that just touches your soul and keeps you thinking about it for a long time after you come out of the theater. ShoojitSircar’s October is one such film. It stars Varun Dhawan and newcomer Banita Sandhu in lead roles. ShoojitSircar is known to make films that are heart touching and draws a lot of people in movie ticket bookings. His last film Piku was a commercial success. It starred DeepikaPadukone, Irrfan and Amitabh Bachchan and many people are doing Online movie ticket booking to see it on the big screen.
October is the story of Dan, played by Varun Dhawan, an intern at a five star hotel who sort of has feelings for Shewli, a fellow colleague. When Shewli falls off the roof of the hotel one night, asking “where is Dan?” as her last words, Dan cannot help but wonder why she did so. The film then portrays Dan trying to be with Shewli as she becomes paralyzed and goes into a coma. He becomes the support system of Shewli’s family as well.
ShoojitSircar weaved his magic again with such stunning cinematography that is bound to leave the audience in awe. The music score from Shantanu Moitra is another gem as well. October is bound to be one of the best films in the recent years. It is unbelievable that the same Varun Dhawan whose last film was Judwaa 2 is so freaking brilliant in this film.
October is not a romantic film, but yet Varun Dhawan’s character will amaze you. The film got popular again due to word of mouth and tremendous critical reviews. Theatre owners increased their movie show timings for the film after the initial 2 days. It became the highest grossing film of the week due to a huge number of movie ticket bookings. Varun Dhawan and Banita Sandhu went around promoting the film in multiple cities and in different advertisements. Theatre owners gave away movie ticket coupons for the film in the form of food vouchers to draw people to the theatre.
Online booking sites ran promotions in the form of movie ticket offers as cashback or vouchers to get more people to book using their apps. The extremely high score given by popular critics like Anupama Chopra and Raja Sen also helped the film draw audience. Many people were so amazed by the film that they went for multiple viewings, thus increasing the revenue from cinema ticket bookings.
A film like October is very rare in this present market of commercial films. Making such a film is a big risk and kudos to ShoojitSircar for taking such a risk. Varun Dhawan is a revelation and he should focus on working on these type of films more often than not. We can only hope that Bollywood learns from this film and a few of the upcoming Bollywood movies in the next few years are also like this, with a simple story yet brilliant direction and execution.