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There are, broadly speaking, two types of Vishal Bhardwaj films. The first kind unfold with control and fixity of purpose: Maqbool, Omkara, Haider. The second, films like Matru Ki Bijli Ka Mandola, Kaminey, Rangoon, are looser, zanier, Bhardwaj like a witch gleefully tossing arcane ingredients into a cauldron. The first category has all his classics, and would seem the essential one to understand the director. Yet, the latter is where I think we see the full flowering of Bhardwaj’s weirdness and breadth of interests.
O’Romeo is decidedly Bhardwaj as mad scientist. Over three chaotic hours, we get gunfights, bullfights, flamenco guitars, item numbers, Kumar Sanu nostalgia, Ganesh Chaturthi, Mumbai gang wars, a masquerade at a Spanish villa, a visit to Kathmandu and a Carnatic classical-singing Marathi cop. It’s all over the place and yet there’s an underlying emotional logic to the whole thing, a web of betrayals and transgressions that binds the three central players.
To be known by your weapon of choice is a gangster’s dream—and hitman Ustara (Shahid Kapoor) takes this seriously. Pressed to carry out a killing for Intelligence Bureau man Khan (Nana Patekar), he literally brings a knife to a gunfight. He wins anyway, with the blessings of Madhuri Dixit. It’s a bloody start to the film, a demonstration of Ustara’s bona fides. Yet, almost immediately, Bhardwaj sets about cutting down his hero to size. Khan calls him his dog. His grandmother (Farida Jalal) orders him around. And instead of the escort he orders, there’s an unexpected challenge waiting in his boathouse suite, fresh from iftaar, in need of a gun for hire.
Afsha (Triptii Dimri) gets straight to the point. She wants four men killed, including a local inspector, Pathare (the excellent Rahul Deshpande), and the powerful don Jalal (Avinash Tiwary), for murdering her lover (Vikrant Massey), a reluctant accountant for the mob. Ustara has his own complicated history with Jalal, who now operates a drug empire from Spain. He laughs off the idea of taking him on, teasingly addressing Afsha as ‘supaari jaan’ (contract sweetheart). But Afsha won’t go away, and Ustara soon finds himself drawn to the girl and enmeshed in her vendetta (it’s a very Bhardwaj touch to have feelings hit him over a game of carrom).
As with most Mumbai gangster films, this one is based on the work of writer Hussain Zaidi, who has a story credit (the screenplay is by Bhardwaj and Rohan Narula). O’Romeo loosely adapts the story of Hussain Ustara, a real-life don and rival of Dawood Ibrahim. Bhardwaj opens his film in 1995, at the height of the Mumbai mafia’s influence. One of his early successes was as composer for Satya, a gangster film set around this time; I’d imagine the Ganeshotsav set piece is his little tribute to Ram Gopal Varma’s film. When Afsha, a classical singer, tells Ustara she’s from Muzaffarnagar but belongs to the Gwalior gharana, he jokingly replies that he’s from Lucknow and his gharana is Mumbai. He’d instinctively know what she’s talking about: several early Mumbai gangs were formed by immigrants and were named for their place of origin.
About halfway through, the film starts splitting its time between Mumbai and Spain, where Jalal has picked up some mean matador skills to go with his general bloodthirstiness. The chain of events becomes increasingly dreamlike, interrupted every 15 minutes or so by chaotic, florid, thrilling set pieces (the fight coordinator is Navathipan Rajakumar, who worked on two of the most inventive recent Indian action films, An Action Hero and Maaveran). The opening bloodbath at the cinema, with ‘Dhak Dhak Karne Laga’ looming in the background, feels like a concession to post-Animal excess, but is nonetheless thrilling. So is the shootout on a Mumbai local—with a khayal sung by a participant—and an extended set piece in Spain: five kills in five shots, a oner, and a flamboyant spiral.
For all his bloodletting, Ustara is a softie. Even when Afsha is shown to be not quite on the level—Bhardwaj leaves a clue dangling in plain sight—he’s drawn to her cause. Kapoor always does his best work for Bhardwaj, and though Ustara isn’t as complex as the characters he played in Kaminey, Haider and Rangoon, the film coasts off his energy. Dimri is wonderful as well; few suffer as eloquently as her, a quality that’s unfortunately useful in a cinema that expects a lot of that from its female stars.
The third side of the triangle is the weakest. Bullfighting never really makes narrative sense beyond a crazy villain hobby, and though Jalal has his own reasons for anger and hurt, these are lost in his one-dimensional psychopathy and Tiwary’s bulky, unimaginative performance. Like many Indian films now, the last scene of consequence is two buff men pounding on each other. Thankfully, Bhardwaj closes on a more graceful note: a joke wrapped in a bit of art, an appropriate end for a film that’s more playful than you’d expect.
