Short Reviews1-Omkara

I have been watching a lot of Hindi movies over the last week, and this will hopefully be a series to review the ones I found interesting. I don’t really understand cinema much, so they might be more appropriately dismissed as mere ramblings than proper reviews. Anyway, lets start with Omkara.

Omkara may not be the most watched movie of 2006 but it is definitely the most reviewed one, see here and here for two excellent reviews(though in my view, exceedingly gushing ones), hence I will only concentrate on few specific points.

Omkara is set in UP. It is indeed a remarkable achievement on the part of the director to have transformed the story set in Venice to the lawless badlands of UP. The transformation is largely accurate whether it is in the language or the culture or even in the way the power plays out in these lawless lands. This is a land I understand too well, having spend some of the most important and impressionable years of my life there. This is not an exotic land which I can dismiss with a wave of my hands. What I found troubling was the completely moral ambiguity of all the main characters. No one seemed to have any questions regarding what they were doing, even if we accept that the director was a mere narrator telling the story as it unfolded, he seems to touch upon only a few convenient aspects of the society. Which brings us to the biggest problem with Omkara, and here I absolutely agree with Rangan’s review. Othello was a tragedy because he was a noble man, torn apart by jealousy and possessiveness. There is absolutely nothing noble about Omkara, and even references to his birth(half-Brahman) hardly provide any background for his murderous character. While Dolly is all pristine and pure, she never shows any interest in Omakra’s line of work and seems like a contented girlfriend who just wants to marry her love whose occupation happens to be of a gangster. The director does seem to recognise this inherent contradiction and attempts to elevate their love story beyond the cruelness of their everyday existence(even their love making scenes are more ”pure”), however he is largely unsuccessful in it. So what is a tragic fall of a noble man turns into a story where a gangster who kills for a living merely adds one more to the list. Whats the big deal, one is forced to ask? While the climax leaves one numb, it also leaves one cold and unsympathetic to the plight of Omkara

Also, the movie could have done with some editing. The later part of the movie seems to meander along and intricacies of framing Keshu and Dolly test our patience. For example, what exactly was Bipasha Basu doing in the film? Not only was her character completely unnecessary, as a nautch girl she hardly raised any temperatures. Even the Beedi song is more remarkable for the way Saif and Vivek let their hair down rather than any histrionics on Bipasha’s part.

Acting is uniformly good in the movie and even minor characters(watch out for the old woman) make their presence felt. But the movie clearly belong to Saif(Iago) and Konkana Sen Sharma(Renu). Oh! What joy is to see them on the screen. Saif gets in to the skin of the character so magnificently that he becomes Iago, just like that. Such is the power of his performance that he brings a strange justification to his cause. In a culture which places a premium on cunningness and animal instinct for survival, who else was more suitable for the post of bahubali? Saif who plots and schemes and uses every character as a pawn on the chessboard of his ambition or the child-man Keshu? Sen-Sharma is introduced late in the movie and proceeds to almost steal the movie from Iago. Whether it is her raucous laughter when she tells Dolly that the way to man’s heart is not through his stomach but an area more southward or the quiet dignity with which she ticks of Omkara and tells him not come for Dolly if he had any doubts about her character. She has been paired opposite Saif and it is a casting masterstroke. In one of the movie’s best scenes she is straddling Saif after they have just made love, eyes twinkling and yet smouldering, she proceeds to tell Iago that he is her khargosh(Rabbit)! Who else except Sen-Sharma could have told Iago that!?

Omkara is a remarkable achievement but it is no Maqbool. Admittedly they are two different movies. Maqbool is poetry etched on celluloid and it has a certain fatality which this blogger found so interesting while Omakara is raw and earthy. But despite all the technical wizardry, all the authenticity and the fine acting it seems to lack the soul which made Maqbool so spell bounding.