Dir: Vishal Bhardwaj. With: Shahid Kapoor, Triptii Dimri, Avinash Tiwary, Nana Patekar. 178 mins. Cert: 18
It must be Misbegotten Adaptations Week. This Hindi gangland epic’s credentials are impeccable: director Vishal Bhardwaj previously wowed with textured, inventive variations on Macbeth (Maqbool, 2003), Othello (Omkara, 2006) and Hamlet (Haider, 2014). Rather than a straightforward modernisation of Romeo and Juliet, his latest instead revisits a grisly true-crime story ripped from Hussein Zaidi’s Mafia Queens of Mumbai, the compendium that also inspired Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s 2022 hit Gangubai Kathiawadi. The results align Bhardwaj’s cinema with the newly lurid turn mainstream Bollywood has taken via recent smashes Animal and Dhurandhar, but it’s jarring to witness, as if Kenneth Branagh had followed his turn-of-the-Nineties Shakespeare successes by making Natural Born Killers.
For Venice (or Baz Luhrmann’s Venice Beach), Bhardwaj swaps in the Mumbai underworld of the 1990s, ushering on the movies’ first Romeo to be a moral degenerate. Shahid Kapoor’s Hussein Ustara – nicknamed Romeo – is a heavily tattooed bellower employed as a hitman for a local godfather; his Juliet (Animal’s Triptii Dimri) an aggrieved widow clutching a sizeable hitlist. These two are star-crossed: he rescues her amid her bungled assassination attempt on the lawyer smearing her late husband, earning them both powerful foes. Yet they’re chiefly blood-splattered and otherwise begrimed: the fish tank through which Leo glimpsed Claire Danes here abuts the bed to which this Romeo takes two escorts while his Juliet listens in. Happy Valentine’s week, everybody.
Bold imagemaking and considered design persists through the murk, and the performances are strong. Kapoor and Dimri commit to this plot’s peculiar demands, while Nana Patekar is appreciably sly as our anti-hero’s wearied handler. Yet where Gangubai showcased Bhansali’s heightened tonal sensitivity, these gruelling three hours veer between crude and emotionally inert: a tale of obsession and abjection, with its dead-eyed lovers dragging one another towards the gutter and the grave. It’s the kind of distinctive misfire only an artist could make, typically when they’re so hung up on a story they swallow its poisons whole. Still, mildly heartbreaking to see such a thoughtful cineaste tossing his library card to play the leering tough guy: that title invites reading with a rueful shake of the head.
O' Romeo is now showing in selected cinemas.
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