‘O’Romeo’ Movie Review: A Curiously Ineffective Vishal Bhardwaj Special

You can see what Vishal Bhardwaj is trying to do with O’Romeo. The film is inspired by a chapter from journalist Hussain Zaidi’s Mafia Queens of Mumbai (Gangubai Kathiawadi was another). The chapter delves into the life of Sapna Didi, a damsel in distress who mutates into a femme fatale in her quest to avenge the murder of her husband and take down dreaded don Dawood Ibrahim. She takes the help of Hussain Ustara, a Dawood rival and sharpshooter, to disrupt the D-Company empire and aid her mission. The mighty Bhardwaj takes these factoids and runs with them; he also sprints, strolls, jogs and trips with them. The very loose adaptation means that O’Romeo — as per its title — reframes the Sapna Didi story as an Ustara tragedy. Keeping with the times, it is centered on a cold-blooded womanizer who is tamed by love. His masculinity finds purpose; even his violence becomes an ode to her. He doesn’t gatecrash her narrative; she supplies his. He is both man-child and male saviour at once. Her wish is his demand. Where have we heard that before?

The lens is not the film’s problem, though. You could argue that the shift of perspective allows for a one-sided romance where revenge becomes a love language. You could also argue that the revisionist gaze — Bhardwaj and co-writer Rohan Narula go the Tarantino way in terms of historical catharsis — gives the makers the liberty to subvert character templates. It’s a version of how a wronged widow need not become a ruthless underworld figure to get her revenge; an ordinary Muslim woman need not compromise on her identity to make a dent in a male-dominated field. So Afshan Siddiqui (Triptii Dimri) remains a messy and fragile Afshan Siddiqui here. She isn’t burdened with the social responsibility of entering ‘Sapna Didi’ mode. One of the interesting aspects is that she’s so blinded by the idea of revenge that she underestimates how implausible it sounds. Her naivety is almost refreshing. She has no sense of scale or image when she goes after the dreaded Jalal (Avinash Tiwary) and his cronies; they’re just a bunch of bad men who killed her husband (Vikrant Massey). Instead Ustara (Shahid Kapoor) is the one transformed; he’s her rent-a-heart hitman who takes it upon himself to rid her of the pressure to transform. It’s not that we see her all helpless and weepy through his eyes. It’s more that we see an alternative account of fates colliding — and reclaiming hope from the jaws of reality.

The issue with O’Romeo is more primal. The storytelling is strangely conventional. At 178 minutes, it slaps on the style and idiosyncrasy to offset a narrative that flits between looking cool, being commercially accessible and being a throwback to gangster flicks of yore. The soundtrack is fine, but the song placement (hero is leaving, so one last dance at his favourite brothel) is safe. Some of the music is visibly designed to inflate moments and inject personality into what is largely a derivative story of passion. The banter between the man and his friends tries hard to entertain. Shahid Kapoor is a different beast in Vishal Bhardwaj movies, but his rendition of Ustara is full of performative aggression — like a mobster whose swag is borrowed entirely from the campy Westerns he’s grown up watching. It’s hard to take the character seriously, especially when he’s serious. He is spoken of as a thorn in the powerful baddie’s path — a soulmate (“we are two hearts in the same chest”) of sorts — but the film fails to mine this aura. There’s also the old-school grasp of morality through the good-gangster-bad-gangster trope. Ustara is supposed to be the good one because he didn’t agree with Jalal’s ‘ethics’ as a don; Jalal is supposed to be the evil one because he doesn’t mind resorting to terrorism once in a while. One is a patriotic animal; the other is a nationless beast. Or is one a beast and the other, a monster?

Many of the plot twists — where characters are suddenly revealed to be undercover in flashbacks — feel like a last-ditch effort to sell these lofty themes. It’s hard to see a social angle in a movie that’s too sprawling to realise its core emotions. The staging is uncharacteristically corny, too. Jalal is based out of Spain so that the film has a reason to be visually diverse. Besides growling into a satellite phone to his Indian associates and moving like he’s too tired to do ballet, one of his many eccentricities is bull-fighting in an arena full of bloodthirsty locals. After Laila Majnu and Bulbbul, I get the gimmick of casting Avinash Tiwary as the man that a Triptii Dimri character wants to kill. But Tiwary plays Jalal as such a loony villain that, much like Ustara, the don looks like the star of an expensive costume ball waiting for the cameras to find him. The pre-interval sequence revolves around the ‘dark’ intro of Jalal as a bull-slayer juxtaposed with Afshan’s descent into the world of killing. It’s like watching the film search for cinematic expression instead of creating it. There’s also the confusing character of Khan (Nana Patekar), the IB officer who uses Ustara as a hired hitman for his own encounter killings. It feels like the film hesitates to antagonise him — he is quite despicable — out of reverence for the uniform.

Even the concept of doomed love remains more of a concept. Ustara abruptly falls for Afshan because that’s the urban legend, not because he slowly grows feelings for someone who knows how to love. By default, Dimri’s is the turn that punctures the excesses of the men and their lore. Her Afshan is like Dimri’s Bulbbul character jostling with her Animal character; there are also minor shades of Manisha Koirala from Dil Se. The actor may be pigeonholed as someone who can portray a mix of subservience (“how can anyone love so hard?”) and agency (“your love is a burden to my mission”). But she does a decent job of bypassing the porcelain-doll syndrome and staying human, despite a screenplay that reduces Afshan to a supporting act in her own life. While the tortured males are busy making it about themselves (one of them dies during a train shootout but is shown to have survived in the end-credits), she’s happy to stumble and fumble in pursuit of a release. Even the gore is less self-conscious when she is part of a set-piece. Unfortunately, the film isn’t wired to appreciate her enough.

All of which is to say that O’Romeo is far from Vishal Bhardwaj’s most convincing work. There’s a struggle between co-opting the mainstream and settling for it. Even if his non-Shakespearean adaptations don’t always add up as a whole, their parts are undeniable. This film has some of those moments too: where 1990s Bombay is in cheeky conversation with the future. Like Ustara pulling a hit job in a cinema hall while “Dhak Dhak Karne Laga” plays on the screen — a colourful piece that establishes the Bollywood-underworld link without any fuss. Like Khan always making calls from a church that he visits every morning. Like Afshan sporting sindoor under a burqa in disguise (to which Khan responds: “this is our India”). Like a Muslim character offhandedly remarking that she doesn’t mind praying to the Ganpati picture on the wall if her god fails (“as if they’re biased”). Or when a heartbroken Ustara tells Afshal to take off her clothes — and realises he wants her soul and not her body — and we expect him to cover her with a shawl like the sanskari man-child that he’s become. Except he returns to take his bottle, not his dignity. The movie briefly comes alive in these scenes. But it spends the rest of its time reacting to cinema instead of manufacturing its own truth. It strives to be everything else but itself: all sound and fury, signifying nothing.