Omkara Review
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)I still haven’t seen Omkara yet and I blame the Indian wedding scenario for it! I have been extremely busy with a family wedding so haven’t gotten a chance to see this desi Othello. However a lot of readers have asked me how the movie has been received. While the movie did open to mix reviews it’s too early to predict its performance on the B.O. Here is a review done by one of the most respected critics of the Indian Cinema, Subhash K. Jha.
In the brutal heartland of Uttar Pradesh lives a Shakespearean anti -hero called Omkara. He’s the desi re-incarnation of Shakespeare’e “Othello”.
And he’s everything that Shakespeare couldn’t make him… not his fault, really. When the immortal playwright wrote his best-known tragedy he had no idea of the graver tragedy that awaited ’s political heartland.
Delving deep into the bowels of north Indian politics, Vishal Bharadwaj comes up with a gallery of virile characters who jump out of their literary antecedents and do a dance of crime-driven dynamics on the nozzle of their country-made guns.
Omkara looks, feels and smells authentic. When gang wars break out on the rusty roads of a small town in Uttar Pradesh among Omkara, his mentor Bhaisaab (Naseeruddin Shah) and Omkara’s two favourite disciples Kesu (Viveik Oberoi) and Langda Tyagi (Saif Ali Khan) and their opponents, you’re no longer watching the characters, you’re looking at a world where Shakespeare must sound like a spear that shakes.
Besides the fact that he has cast superstars as characters, Vishal’s biggest achievement is the irony that underlines the murky goings-on in the hellish political cauldron of the cow-belt: these are boorish guys driven by a literary background of which they are clueless.
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