O' Romeo

The Weight of the Blade

I’ve spent most of the weekend trying to figure out what Vishal Bhardwaj was really reaching for with *O’Romeo*. This is a filmmaker who has made a career out of dragging Shakespearean tragedy into the dust, blood, and heat of the Indian underworld, and usually he lands with force. Here, drawing from a chapter in Hussain Zaidi’s *Mafia Queens of Mumbai*, he makes something that is undeniably ambitious and, at the same time, strangely draining. It runs 178 minutes and plays like a revenge opera with romance, rust, and razor blades. Whether that works for you probably comes down to how much patience you have for a film this intoxicated by its own excess.



There’s an early scene that tells you exactly what kind of ride this is. Ustara (Shahid Kapoor), our blade-happy anti-hero, is hiding out on a rusted boat. The camera stays on his slumped body as he strums a guitar, all weary swagger, before he suddenly slices through a threat with a barber’s blade. The sound design is so tactile you can almost feel the scrape of metal on bone. It’s a terrific sequence at first. Then it keeps going, and some of that charge leaks out into a long conversation about loyalty that sounds awfully familiar if you’ve spent any time around gangster movies.

Kapoor, to his credit, commits completely. After years of playing volatile, damaged men, with *Kabir Singh* still hanging somewhere around the edges of his image, he knows how to wear this kind of broken swagger. Watch what happens to that wiry frame when he realizes he’s just another piece on Nana Patekar’s intelligence officer’s board. The fatigue in his body is unmistakable. He keeps the film standing even after the script starts losing its grip on cause and effect.



The real problem is how badly the film wants to be two things at once. Is it a hard-edged procedural, or is it a doomed love story? Triptii Dimri arrives as Afsha, a widow bent on avenging herself against underworld boss Jalal (Avinash Tiwary). She gives the role a quiet sorrow that feels tightly coiled, like she’s holding every muscle in her face in place by force. But the script never quite lets her breathe. Too often, the dialogue spells out what Dimri is already saying with her eyes.

I’m clearly not the only one who felt that tug-of-war. Writing for *The Hindu*, Anuj Kumar summed up the problem neatly, saying that "Shahid Kapoor soars, Vishal Bhardwaj struggles in this meandering romantic action drama." Meanwhile, *The Hollywood Reporter India*'s Rahul Desai wrote that it "fails to make a dent in the Bombay gangster-epic landscape." I think Desai is basically right, even if I’d soften the blow a little. The film doesn’t reshape the genre, but it still throws off brief sparks of real beauty.



By the final act, when the whole thing starts buckling under the weight of its own fatalism, what’s left is a spectacle that’s beautiful to look at and oddly empty inside. It’s not that Bhardwaj suddenly forgot how to direct. The visuals are rich, with deep crimsons bleeding into Mumbai’s smoggy skies. But somewhere in the collision between yearning and gunfire, *O'Romeo* loses hold of its people. I’m glad I watched it. I just can’t imagine feeling the urge to go back.