O'Romeo

All Filmmakers plot legacy. For Vishal Bhardwaj, it filters to adaptations. The 60-year-old’s career — including 12 feature films in 24 years — is shaped, mostly, by taking literary texts and supplanting them in a world of his making. One can debate the merits, but there is something to be said about the tendency to assert his voice most intensely in borrowed words, thereby amplifying the collaborative spirit of creation. A chief collaborator, in this regard, has been Shakespeare, whose plays assume great malleability in the director’s hands. Bhardwaj’s latest, O’Romeo, is not drawn from one of the playwright’s works but still culminates as an ineffective Shakespeare adaptation — a first from the director.

Vishal Bhardwaj’s cinematic universes can be wildly imaginative. They are the kind where two warring sisters, desperate to escape each other’s sight, end up marrying two brothers by accident. Historically, however, the Indian film industry’s version of audacity usually involves a hero incinerating a factory and sauntering away in slow motion while digital fumes billow behind him. This “mass” template is now more common than a childbirth scene, or a Muslim protagonist shown as an ordinary office worker instead of a kohl-eyed gangster. Trying to join both aspects of their respective universes, O’Romeo uses Bhardwaj’s brand of weirdness and masala movie flamboyance to create a confused mixture with no emotion and limited punch.

Vishal Bhardwaj returns to the big screen after Patakha (2018), although his last outing, Khufiya (2023), was released on Netflix. O Romeo has ambition and style, but at nearly three hours, it lacks the substance required to sustain that runtime and offers little that feels new.

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 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.

नब्बे के दशक में जब मुंबई अंडरवर्ल्ड पर दाउद की डी कंपनी का राज था तो उसका एक विरोधी था हुसैन उस्तरा। इसी हुसैन उस्तरा ने अशरफ खान नाम की उस औरत को बढ़ावा दिया था जिसके पति को दाउद के कहने पर मारा गया। अपने पति के कत्ल का बदला लेने के लिए अशरफ बन गई थी सपना दीदी और उसने उस्तरा के साथ मिल कर दाउद को शारजाह के स्टेडियम में टपकाने का प्लान भी बना डाला था। लेकिन ऐसा हो न सका और डी कंपनी ने पहले सपना को टपकाया, फिर उस्तरा को। मुंबई अंडरवर्ल्ड को करीब से जानने वाले पत्रकार हुसैन ज़ैदी की किताब ‘माफिया क्वीन्स ऑफ मुंबई’ के सपना दीदी पर लिखे अध्याय पर आधारित विशाल भारद्वाज की यह फिल्म ‘ओ रोमियो’ (O’ Romeo) सपना और उस्तरा की कहानी को कुछ अलग नज़रिए से देखती है, कुछ अलग ढंग से दिखाती है।

In the middle of ‘O Romeo, Afshan, the revenge-filled girl from a rich music background, tells Ustara, the razor-wielding contract killer of the Mumbai underworld, that she is from Muzaffarnagar, but her gharana is Gwalior. Ustara responds as if his home is Lucknow, but his gharana is Mumbai. The conversation is writer-director Vishal Bhardwaj’s way of reminding us that his home is Bollywood street, but his gharana is Shakespearana.