O’Romeo is a story of revenge served hot and bloody. Vishal Bhardwaj’s latest film — on many parameters the director’s most commercial outing yet — gets off the blocks with a visceral and violent scene in which Shahid Kapoor’s Ustara whips out his signature ustara (aka razor) and proceeds to cut open half a dozen men. The scene takes place in a single-screen cinema with Madhuri Dixit going “dhak dhak karne laga” even as Ustara goes about slicing and dicing his adversaries with both dramatic precision and poetic choreography. The sequence lays the foundation for the vibe as well as the visual language of O’Romeo — a film that often relies on gratuitous violence but can also be vulnerable and tender (mostly when the ‘Romeo’ in O’Romeo surfaces) when it chooses to be.
It is common knowledge that Bhardwaj had been living with the story of O’Romeo for many years now. The film draws on a tall tale from Mumbai underworld lore and is based on S. Hussain Zaidi’s book Mafia Queens of Mumbai. It draws inspiration specifically from the “Sapna Didi” chapter, with Bhardwaj — aided by co-writer Rohan Narula — employing a revisionist gaze to mould the story born out of vengeance into a film in which matters of the heart are given equal weightage. The problem arises from the fact that the two impulses often struggle to find the correct balance.
Bhardwaj’s Tarantino-esque film may have Hussain Ustara as its eponymous ‘hero’, but the catalyst for his action and emotion rests with Afshan (Triptii Dimri), a widow breathing both fire and embodying fragility, who approaches Ustara to take on a contract to eliminate four men who were responsible for killing her husband (Vikrant Massey in a special appearance). They include a classical music-singing cop Pathare (Rahul Deshpande) and a bull-fighting matador Jalal (Avinash Tiwary).
Ustara has reason himself to face off with Jalal, given that he has already killed the gangster’s brother, but there is also fresh impetus. The heavily tattooed, carefree Ustara spends a lot of time grooving with and romancing dancer Julie (Disha Patani) and has a band of minions waiting on him hand and foot. At one point, a character in the film tellingly observes that Ustara’s heart lies in his groin and not his chest (paraphrased here for family-friendly reading).
But Ustara’s heart soon goes ‘dhak dhak’ for Afshan. He falls for her so truly, madly, deeply that he decides to put his own life on hold to seek revenge for her. Does that make him a classic lover like Shakespeare’s tragic Romeo — Bhardwaj’s love for the Bard is documented in the form of some of his most memorable work — or is he simply a lovelorn buffoon?
O’Romeo has quite a bit going for it. That includes a clutch of well-written and effectively executed scenes brought to life by a bunch of extremely competent actors. A revelation in Ustara’s plan and purpose in life brings us face to face with Intelligence Bureau officer Ismail Khan (Nana Patekar in top form) who also wants to destroy Jalal. Meanwhile, Farida Jalal gleefully destroys her lovable grandma image by chewing the scenery as an expletive-spouting septuagenarian.
Playing out over close to three hours, the minutes begin to tell on O’Romeo, which, having established its narrative framework, including a couple of plot twists, slowly degenerates into a slapdash montage of one action set piece after another. These take place in locations as diverse as a Ganpati visarjan and a local train in Mumbai to a Spanish hacienda and bull ring. Tiwary — the man who was Majnu to Triptii’s Laila in the criminally underwatched Imtiaz Ali film Laila Majnu — is all buffed up and unidimensionally raging, but placing him in Spain doesn’t have much of a rational backing apart from the fact that Bhardwaj perhaps wanted a change of scene and had a bigger budget to play with.
O’Romeo’s central conceit is revenge and romance, but the latter somehow isn’t as effective as it should have been. The operatic tenor of the storytelling has its highs and lows, with the actors all being in fine form. I particularly liked Triptii, who seems to be getting better with every film, with Afshan combining a tricky blend of vulnerable and feral. The music — does it get better than Vishal Bhardwaj teaming up once more with Gulzar? — is used with impact. O’Romeo, as a whole, however, doesn’t deliver the wallop it should have.
My favourite film directed by Vishal Bhardwaj is... Tell t2@abp.in