Paromita Vohra: Meaningless silences

Illustration/ Ravi Jadhav

I have a serious, arty friend who has something of the reputation of being a maestro-seer. In part, this reputation seems to rest on his impassive, lengthy silences, followed by a fleeting phrase in response to a question. It makes me laugh, this adept use of the orthodoxy that silence is always meaningful as a way of not making oneself vulnerable to disagreement or for that matter, agreement.

I thought of this often after watching Shoojit Sarcar's new film October where silence is offered as a similar gesture of gravitas, but feels like an evasion.

It's not that October is not a nice film - it's nice enough. There is a great relief in seeing the itchy emotions that ordinary people, in everyday lives, are caught up in, that Mr. Sarcar and his writer-collaborator Juhi Chaturvedi explore. They are consistently, formulaically good at creating unlikeable, irritable, literal-minded protagonists who find a certain poetry in life. While their cross-generational relationships and rich representation of older characters is thrilling, their squeamishness in the face of romantic relationships is intriguing. They have a noble assertiveness in talking about bodily fluids - semen, shit and pee all play strong parts in their work. But this unwavering gaze also seems to bring a wholesomeness that makes their work too neat, not able to cinematically engage with mess.

And it is this that makes October dissatisfying. Its silences are suggested as our accompanying the characters in their tedious wait (as one who has had to care for someone who is dying, I testify to this tedium, this continuing of shallow normalcy in the depth of grief). The silences gesture at depth but are in fact empty.

In the film a rather typically millennial boy who doesn't put his heart and soul into anything and is quick to blame circumstances, is finally able to be attentive to himself, through the act of paying attention to someone else, for no evident reason. While we may recognise Dan's catatonia, we are given too little entry into his journey, which feels quite technical. Rack focus shots of flowers are pretty, but slightly obvious metaphors for the cycle of life. The false gravitas of the silences suddenly reveals itself in the end, where with an embarrassingly heavy hand, the symbolic meaning of the shuli flower, which blooms intense and beautiful, but for a brief season, is discussed down to the last possible T. It is a far too noisy explanation that emphasises the tininess of the film's silences.

October has been praised - justly - for its wonderful performances - and tiresomely, for not being like a once-typical Bollywood film - no songs (I don't know why the absence of songs continues to be a symbol of quality. It's very silly) and no melodrama. Yet, there is a certain emotional commitment in melodrama as well as in minimalism, which is a little too absent in October.

It's interesting that Dan finds meaning, such as it is, in the presence of someone who does not speak. It is as if we find ourselves in a moment where the full, talkative, thriving, messy presence of another is too much for us to take. That only a somewhat comatose film, allows viewers a confidence of their own feelings. It's a worthy service if so, that speaks disquietingly, to the low emotional confidence of our times.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevipictures.com

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