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dangermousieJust got back from Omkara,, India's take on Othello, set among the political underworld of Uttar Pradesh and WOW. This has knocked off Fanaa from my favorite movie of the year spot. Actually, it's pretty much in the running for my favorite Bollywood movie ever.
Let me repeat that, wow. This was one of the very rare movies where I really didn't have anything I had a problem with or wanted to correct. It was tragic, brutal, and completely irresistible. Very very tight screenplay. And it was perfectly cast. In fact, the movie works in a large part because the cast is so pitch perfect.
First off, Saif Ali Khan who plays this version's Iago, named Langda. Wow. It's amazing that someone I found so charming and boyish and adorable in Parineeta can portray someone like Langda. Half the time I wanted to peer at him through my fingers. He was chilling and yet I was unable to take my eyes from him. You hate him, you want him to stop what he is doing (as it's clear Omkara would have eventually chilled out if it wasn't for Langda's continued provocation) and yet you can't help but like him at the same time. My favorite scene of his is when he pushes Dolly's erstwhile fiance into the water, no warning no notice, and calmly walks away as the guy is screaming for help. He is horrible, but there is such a vitality to him. He is frighteningly good at manipulating people in this movie: just watch his 'yes or no' scene with Omkara in the rain where he states that he believes Dolly is unfaithful. Omkara is on the edge and Langda manages to play it perfectly. He is a master manipulator (foreshadowed by his skill at that game. He probably sees the people as game pieces). And he has an amazingly expressive face. Just watch him as he sees the Generalship given to Kesu. Or when he smashes the mirror and smears the blood on his own forehead. Wow. I hope he gets a lot of awards for this.
Second off, Ajay Devgan, who plays Omkara, this version's Othello. He puts in an amazing, AMAZING performance. Maybe the best I've seen of his so far (and with him, that's quite a compliment). You get that he is someone who can be both incredibly loving and yet quite dangerous. He is rather elemental but that very quality makes him too straightforward to deal with Langda. And through the whole movie you watch him fall apart, as he slowly comes to believe that the woman he loves more than life is unfaithful to him. This movie has the same feel the play does in that respect: the tragedy is inevitable and full of gradual small steps and you want to jump in there and to stop it but you can't. You see how much it's twisting him, how he doesn't want to believe it, how he tries to deny it to himself. He is no fool (Othello is very good about making the central misunderstanding believable. There isn't one of those annoying 'if only they'd talk to each other' bits). And he is intense and amazingly romantic with Kareena. They have great chemistry and I loved their scenes together. And the mood in those can turn on a dime: the scene where he first starts to suspect her and comes in while she tries to play him a silly song starts out turly menacing and suddenly he laughs and his eyes thaw and the whole scene becomes swimmingly romantic. You really get the feeling those two truly love each other and that is what makes it so devastating, in the end.
Dolly is clearly his trigger (see the scene with the rival group early on), because he loves her so much, and that is something Langda picks on immediately. I liked that he was made some sort of political enforcer, who has killed people before. I think it was necessary for the story. Otherwise, in a modern world, unless he was a military officer on very active duty, he would be unlikely to have ever killed before and thus be accustomed to violence. I think that is why he is capable of killing Dolly: he's killed before, it's his response. If he'd never killed before her, it wouldn't have been as believable. And of course, what plays into his jealosy is his sense of unworthiness. Of course Dolly is going to cheat on him, he thinks, because how can someone like her (pale skinned beauty, a lawyer's daughter) love someone like him, a half-caste goon. And what Dolly's father said also plays into it: he does think that if her father who knew her well suspected nothing, then maybe he, Omkara, is in the same position today.
And can he angst. The scene near the end, where he asks Dolly what he lacked and he holds her and then he puts her down and then he chokes her as she futily claws at him (I don't think she really understood his question earlier, she just thought they were having one of their fights), and their bodies jerk together in a horrible parody of love-making scenes earlier? I wanted to look away. And then he just sits by her that night? Wow. But my favorite, utterly heartbreaking scene was afterwards, after he found out that he's killed the love of his life and she was innocent is him lying by her on that swing and singing to her that little song he was singing to her much earlier in the movie, to wake up. And it's the same swing, and the same song, and the same people, but it's completely different and I think I was grabbing my arms to stop from whimpering. And then you just see him cry and I don't know how he manages to look so utterly destroyed, completely gone, and yet so quiet, but he does. And then he shoots himself and you see his body under the swing and hers on it and the swing is swinging back and forth and it's one of the most memorable movie images, for me, in the recent past.
Oh, and on a shallow note, Oh My God. He takes off his shirt in this movie and all I can say, if I were a dog, my tongue would be hanging out. It was anyway, or nearly. He has the body to die for and I think it's the first movie he's removed his shirt for ever but it should be mandatory. Though maybe not as I couldn't follow the story so well when his shirt was off :)
Kareena Kapoor who played Dolly, this version's Desdemona, was also wonderful. She managed to portray the playfulness and the love and the innocence. You saw her happy, you saw how Omkara would fall for her, and you really felt for her world disintegrating (and what options did she have, anyway?) She and Ajay had excellent chemistry. I actually loved their love-making scenes, they weren't tawdry or vulgar but beautiful. That whole movie was very passionate, in a very adult mature way.
I am getting quite long winded so I should make it shorter from now on. I thought Konkona Sen Sharma who played this version Emilia, did an excellent job as a tough, earthy fun woman who sees the world change and doesn't know why and then has to deal with the fact that her husband is responsible. And she had a great feminist speech. I thought Vivek Oberoi as Kesu (this version's Cassio) was excellent in this. His Kesu was appealing and likeable and charismatic and I felt horrible in his being entrapped by Langda. And Bipasha Basu, as this version's Bianca, shone in her small role. She was wonderful.
I also love that the movie just ended. No epilogue, no nothing. Just that shot and Omkara's body under the swing and swing-swing and that's it. Too often movies have epilogues that dissipate the tension or tragedy of the ending, but Omkara avoided it. 11/10, for me.
Let me repeat that, wow. This was one of the very rare movies where I really didn't have anything I had a problem with or wanted to correct. It was tragic, brutal, and completely irresistible. Very very tight screenplay. And it was perfectly cast. In fact, the movie works in a large part because the cast is so pitch perfect.
First off, Saif Ali Khan who plays this version's Iago, named Langda. Wow. It's amazing that someone I found so charming and boyish and adorable in Parineeta can portray someone like Langda. Half the time I wanted to peer at him through my fingers. He was chilling and yet I was unable to take my eyes from him. You hate him, you want him to stop what he is doing (as it's clear Omkara would have eventually chilled out if it wasn't for Langda's continued provocation) and yet you can't help but like him at the same time. My favorite scene of his is when he pushes Dolly's erstwhile fiance into the water, no warning no notice, and calmly walks away as the guy is screaming for help. He is horrible, but there is such a vitality to him. He is frighteningly good at manipulating people in this movie: just watch his 'yes or no' scene with Omkara in the rain where he states that he believes Dolly is unfaithful. Omkara is on the edge and Langda manages to play it perfectly. He is a master manipulator (foreshadowed by his skill at that game. He probably sees the people as game pieces). And he has an amazingly expressive face. Just watch him as he sees the Generalship given to Kesu. Or when he smashes the mirror and smears the blood on his own forehead. Wow. I hope he gets a lot of awards for this.
Second off, Ajay Devgan, who plays Omkara, this version's Othello. He puts in an amazing, AMAZING performance. Maybe the best I've seen of his so far (and with him, that's quite a compliment). You get that he is someone who can be both incredibly loving and yet quite dangerous. He is rather elemental but that very quality makes him too straightforward to deal with Langda. And through the whole movie you watch him fall apart, as he slowly comes to believe that the woman he loves more than life is unfaithful to him. This movie has the same feel the play does in that respect: the tragedy is inevitable and full of gradual small steps and you want to jump in there and to stop it but you can't. You see how much it's twisting him, how he doesn't want to believe it, how he tries to deny it to himself. He is no fool (Othello is very good about making the central misunderstanding believable. There isn't one of those annoying 'if only they'd talk to each other' bits). And he is intense and amazingly romantic with Kareena. They have great chemistry and I loved their scenes together. And the mood in those can turn on a dime: the scene where he first starts to suspect her and comes in while she tries to play him a silly song starts out turly menacing and suddenly he laughs and his eyes thaw and the whole scene becomes swimmingly romantic. You really get the feeling those two truly love each other and that is what makes it so devastating, in the end.
Dolly is clearly his trigger (see the scene with the rival group early on), because he loves her so much, and that is something Langda picks on immediately. I liked that he was made some sort of political enforcer, who has killed people before. I think it was necessary for the story. Otherwise, in a modern world, unless he was a military officer on very active duty, he would be unlikely to have ever killed before and thus be accustomed to violence. I think that is why he is capable of killing Dolly: he's killed before, it's his response. If he'd never killed before her, it wouldn't have been as believable. And of course, what plays into his jealosy is his sense of unworthiness. Of course Dolly is going to cheat on him, he thinks, because how can someone like her (pale skinned beauty, a lawyer's daughter) love someone like him, a half-caste goon. And what Dolly's father said also plays into it: he does think that if her father who knew her well suspected nothing, then maybe he, Omkara, is in the same position today.
And can he angst. The scene near the end, where he asks Dolly what he lacked and he holds her and then he puts her down and then he chokes her as she futily claws at him (I don't think she really understood his question earlier, she just thought they were having one of their fights), and their bodies jerk together in a horrible parody of love-making scenes earlier? I wanted to look away. And then he just sits by her that night? Wow. But my favorite, utterly heartbreaking scene was afterwards, after he found out that he's killed the love of his life and she was innocent is him lying by her on that swing and singing to her that little song he was singing to her much earlier in the movie, to wake up. And it's the same swing, and the same song, and the same people, but it's completely different and I think I was grabbing my arms to stop from whimpering. And then you just see him cry and I don't know how he manages to look so utterly destroyed, completely gone, and yet so quiet, but he does. And then he shoots himself and you see his body under the swing and hers on it and the swing is swinging back and forth and it's one of the most memorable movie images, for me, in the recent past.
Oh, and on a shallow note, Oh My God. He takes off his shirt in this movie and all I can say, if I were a dog, my tongue would be hanging out. It was anyway, or nearly. He has the body to die for and I think it's the first movie he's removed his shirt for ever but it should be mandatory. Though maybe not as I couldn't follow the story so well when his shirt was off :)
Kareena Kapoor who played Dolly, this version's Desdemona, was also wonderful. She managed to portray the playfulness and the love and the innocence. You saw her happy, you saw how Omkara would fall for her, and you really felt for her world disintegrating (and what options did she have, anyway?) She and Ajay had excellent chemistry. I actually loved their love-making scenes, they weren't tawdry or vulgar but beautiful. That whole movie was very passionate, in a very adult mature way.
I am getting quite long winded so I should make it shorter from now on. I thought Konkona Sen Sharma who played this version Emilia, did an excellent job as a tough, earthy fun woman who sees the world change and doesn't know why and then has to deal with the fact that her husband is responsible. And she had a great feminist speech. I thought Vivek Oberoi as Kesu (this version's Cassio) was excellent in this. His Kesu was appealing and likeable and charismatic and I felt horrible in his being entrapped by Langda. And Bipasha Basu, as this version's Bianca, shone in her small role. She was wonderful.
I also love that the movie just ended. No epilogue, no nothing. Just that shot and Omkara's body under the swing and swing-swing and that's it. Too often movies have epilogues that dissipate the tension or tragedy of the ending, but Omkara avoided it. 11/10, for me.
