In the middle of a busy, noisy action sequence there sometimes arrives a moment of visual and narrative clarity that leaves you thinking about that specific frame long after the end credits roll. For me that moment happened during the opening fight sequence of Vishal Bhardwaj’s excellent new romantic thriller O’Romeo. It’s Mumbai circa 1995, and the flamboyant hitman/gangster-in-exile ‘Ustara’ (Shahid Kapoor; ‘razor is the Hindi word for ‘straight razor’) is in the middle of hunting down his latest target — who’s sitting in a movie theatre watching Madhuri Dixit dancing to ‘Started banging’ from the film Beta (1992).
Having just started slashing his target’s henchmen, Ustara pauses and is beautifully framed around the theatre’s exit door, the red ‘Exit’ sign overhead gently lighting his dancing silhouette as he responds to Madhuri’s gyrations with a Michael Jackson-style pelvic thrust. The frame is aesthetically pleasing on its own but it is further elevated by what happens right after — Ustara wielding his razor with a distinctly ’90s Hong-Kong-movie-style frenzy, corpses clogging up the aisles and exaggerated bloodsprays overwhelming the camera (while ‘Started banging’ morphs into a techno version of itself).
Remember, in the ’90s, with the popularity of Hong Kong cinema VCDs and VHS tapes in India, Bollywood was forced to amp up its blood-and-gore as well as improve the quality of combat scenes. With this masterful opening sequence, Bhardwaj signals both the tonality of his own film, as well as the tonal shift we saw in the ’90s Bollywood actioners O’Romeo is modelled on. To borrow a line from Shahid Kapoor’s own R. Rajkumarwe moved from “pyaar-pyaar-pyaar” to “but-but-but”.
Based on a chapter from the true crime book Mafia Queens of Mumbai (2011), O’Romeo has a deceptively straightforward plot. Ustara — an eccentric, headstrong, smooth-talking, moon-walking hitman — is covertly working with Intelligence Bureau officer Khan (Nana Patekar) to bring down the empire of Jalal (Avinash Tiwary), the Spain-dwelling gangster Ustara is hiding from. Their best-laid plans, however, go awry when Ustara meets and is quickly besotted with Afshan (Triptii Dimri), a widow who seeks bloody revenge of her own against Jalal and his cronies in the police and the courts. In Bhardwaj’s skilled hands, however, this basic premise unfurls in surprising directions and becomes much more than the sum of its parts. Anchored by career-best outings from Shahid Kapoor and Triptii Dimri (and memorable supporting acts by Patekar and Tiwary), boosted by some vintage Bhardwaj-Gulzar music and characteristically strong work from the German cinematographer Ben Bernhard, O’Romeo is Vishal Bhardwaj returning to peak form.
The sights and sounds of the ’90s
Bernhard, I feel, deserves a lot of credit in particular. He is renowned for his work on critically acclaimed documentaries like the unique, wordless nature film Watercolor (2018), or Shaunak Sen’s Oscar-nominated All That Breathes (2022), where he was noted for his ability to imbue perfectly ordinary, everyday urban settings with a distinctly “cinematic” light. His “street-level” shots are especially strong, slow pans and long takes revealing the kind of tight-knit urban sprawl ’90s Mumbai featured. A breathtaking chase sequence on foot in the first half pays tribute to Satyathe foundational text for every Bollywood gangster film that came after it. A bull-fighting scene introducing Jalal is shot with flair and athletic urgency, until you feel every whorl of earth kicked up by the charging beast.
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Musically speaking, this is once again a vintage Vishal Bhardwaj album, equal parts playful and contemplative. While the up-tempo qawwali ‘Ashiqon’s Colony’ has been rightly ruling the charts, the more impressive achievement for me is the ethereal ‘Hum Toh Tere Hi Liye The’ by Arijit Singh. It’s speculated that Singh’s recently announced retirement from playback was fuelled by the unimaginative songs he was being offered — if so, ‘Hum Toh Tere Hi Liye The’ is the kind of vintage love song that may yet bring him back to the Bollywood fold. What can we say, meanwhile, about Gulzar? The most recognisable lyricist in India stamps his authority on lines like “The soul is guilty of the share / Laughter also seems guilty” (the self moves in fear; even laughter feels like a criminal) from ‘Ishq Ka Fever’, another winner for Arijit here.
The ’90s Bollywood staples like ‘In front of the eyes, near the heart’ and ‘What is my heart?’ are used intelligently at various points in the film, scoring everything from heartfelt emotional scenes to flat-out bloodbaths. Overall, the film’s soundscape feels truly authentic to the ’90s and even more so to the ’90s Mumbai.
Lots of minute details add up to the foreshadowing Bhardwaj sets out here. For example, Jalal lives in ‘La Linea, Spain’, La Linea being Spanish for ‘the line’. It points to the fact that eventually, Ustara and Afshan have to go to Spain to meet their adversary — foreshadowed by Afshan saying she has to cross a moral and spiritual “lakeer” (Hindi/Urdu for ‘line’) in order to attain her revenge.
A Shahid Kapoor tour de force
It’s no secret that Shahid Kapoor has done the best work of his life with Vishal Bhardwaj, whether it was playing contrasting twins in Kaminey (2009) or his unforgettable, traumatised-Kashmiri Hamlet in Haider (2014). For me, his performance as Ustara is as good as either, maybe even slightly better. While the emotional complexities of all three films are considerable, in O’Romeo, Kapoor also has combat scenes that are genuinely challenging at a purely physical level. And he aces every one of them. Ustara is compelling as an unlikely ‘white knight’, brilliant as the wounded lover, and electric as the unhinged maverick. Kapoor’s mixture of vulnerability and raw kineticism (the ‘lachak’ in his dance moves has never been more lachkeela/flexible) makes sure that the audience is locked in throughout.
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Bollywood is currently content to use Triptii Dimri purely as a sex symbol post-Animalbut her performance as Afshan ought to show Mumbai producers the error of their ways. How Afshan first discovers and then channels her own capacity for manipulation and cold-blooded violence is depicted superbly by Bhardwaj. A sly subversion of the femme fatale archetype, Afshan is quietly Machiavellian with the world but also disarmingly honest with Ustara. This duality is highlighted time and again by Dimri’s doleful, long-suffering eyes and world-weary manner. She has a real gift for portraying young people who are in fact old souls.
Patekar essentially plays a variant of his classic encounter cop character Sadhu Agashe from Ab Tak Chappanand dishes out some signature straight-faced wisecracks, usually directed at Ustara or his spirited grandmother (Farida Jalal in a delightful cameo).
A mention must be made of the incredible physical transformation of Avinash Tiwary, who looks supremely buff and nearly unrecognisable as the antagonist Jalal. Built like a middleweight boxer, Jalal has artistic pretensions (signalled by his bullfighting, and his finger-painting with his wife) but in crucial moments of artistic finesse (like his matador moment defeating the bull), the brute in him reawakens and scares away the artist. If you remember Tiwary only as the slender, soft-spoken, England-returned Satyajeet from Bulbul (2020), you may be forgiven for thinking that this is a completely different actor. Jalal’s signature line here is also memorable: “If you love me, you will also give me love, tune in to anger.” (Even our love comes at a cost; you chose to buy resentment instead).
On the whole, O’Romeo is a potent reminder of Vishal Bhardwaj’s full suite of skills, and why he is considered one of the greatest Bollywood directors of the 21st century. It’s not quite as accomplished as Maqboolor as nakedly explosive as Omkarabut it is a formidable, immersive work of art and certainly both Bhardwaj’s and Kapoor’s best work since Haider (2014).
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