Have we seen a more vivid depiction of humanised evil than Saif Ali Khan’s Langda Tyagi? I can’t recall a more loathsome creature of self-interest than this. Except maybe Vikrant Massey’s Prem Kumar in Aditya Nimbalkar’s Sector 36.
But then that’s crossing the wires. Vishal Bharadwaj’s Omkara, a rugged vigorous adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello takes Old Willie Boy to the Uttar Pradesh heartland.
I first saw parts of Omkara in Vishal Bharadwaj’s office in 2005. I told him I had never seen such a blend of brutality and tenderness.
“Do you think it would get me the audience that Maqbool didn’t?” Vishal asked , not with the least anxiety.
Bharadwaj’s Othello is played by Ajay Devgan. He’s everything that Shakespeare couldn’t make Othello. When the immortal playwright wrote his best-known tragedy he had no idea of the graver tragedy that awaited India’s political heartland. Omkara looks, feels and smells authentic.
When gangwars break out on the rusty coffee-coloured roads of a small town in Uttar Pradesh we are not looking at the actors. We are eyeballing the characters, so deeply involved with the rituals of rapine rivalry, they feel like people you know although you don’t want to.
The most interesting exchanges among the characters are the ones that describe the dynamics of gender and politics in a world where laws are made to be broken. Into this anarchic wilderness, a tender love story creeps in. Omkara’s uncharacteristic lapse into tenderness when he meets the fragile but firm Dolly (Kareena Kapoor). Dolly is a subtle sly Desdemona touch that makes us want to crave for much more.
The Omkara-Langda relationship is the film’s pivot. Iago’s Machiavellian jealousy in Othello is transposed into a state of stunning bedroom politics. Saif Ali Khan as the ruthlessly scheming cow-belt Iago is so authentic you wonder where all that evil comes from! He skilfully and yet effortlessly steals every moment from Devgan.
Iago is here transformed into a foul-tongued diabolic vermin with not a shred of shame or remorse. Bharadwaj controls the inter-relations with enormous skill. Every character exists through his or her bonding with his immediate surroundings. Every relationship is full-blooded and passionate. Every friendship and enmity crackles and hisses with serpentine stealth.
This is a Shakespearean adaptation subsuming a wealth of intimate impulses interwoven into heartland politics. A de-frozen sentimentality in a milieu that shuns sentimentality and yet wallows in theatrical emotions. The characters live for the moment and die for a cause that no one really cares to study indepth. They are too busy fighting one another to fight the demons within themselves.
Not that Omkara is a flawless adaptation. It sometimes suffers from an excess of adaptive colloquialism. Too many crooks spoil the wrath. But then the anger is also utilized an anchor.
