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Release
date:
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May 4, 2018
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Director:
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Hansal Mehta
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Cast:
Language:
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Rajkummar Rao, Timothy Ryan Hickernell, Keval Arora
Hindi
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From the commonplace emerges the
terrifying, from the unexceptional comes horrifying evil in Hansal Mehta’s unusual
biography of the dreaded terrorist Omar Sheikh. As biopics go, this one chucks
all templates out of the window: Sheikh’s childhood is given a complete go-by, as
are a backstory and conventional ‘explanations’ for his murderous actions in
the years of his life brought to us in Omerta.
What we get instead is a
clinical, factual, dispassionate account of his role in the 1994 abduction of
Western tourists in India, his release from an Indian prison in exchange for
hostages in the hijacked Indian Airlines Flight IC 814 held in Kandahar, his
involvement in the 9/11 attacks and the 2002 beheading of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl for which he was
convicted and sentenced to death by a Pakistani court. Sixteen years later, he
is still in a prison in Pakistan. (Note: Although Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh – a
British terrorist of Pakistani descent – was convicted for Pearl’s murder, doubts have been raised in certain quarters about whether he actually killed the
American with his own hands. Omerta unequivocally
accepts that he did.)
In the way these events are
recounted matter-of-factly, with the film cutting between the actors and news
footage, Omerta feels like a
dramatised documentary feature. No overt effort is made to evoke sympathy or
revulsion for the man at the centre of it all. True, we learn that he was
angered and embittered by the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims – his “brothers and
sisters” as he repeatedly calls them – in Europe in the early 1990s, but there
is no suffering at his own doorstep, the sort that might help an ordinary
viewer wrap her head around the icy detachment with which he commits
unimaginable acts of violence.
Omerta offers nothing to those who are
invested in the idea of the inertia of human goodness (the notion, as Isaac
Newton might have put it, that all people are reasonably good and will remain reasonably
so unless compelled by external forces to act against their natural instincts),
nothing that would allow regular folk to say “That happened to his parent/sibling/wife/child/friend/him? Ah okay,
now that explains it.” Instead we are
compelled to confront the possibility that a seemingly normal, intelligent,
educated individual with no personal tragedy haunting him could be easily brainwashed
into deep commitment to an extremist cause, or worse, that a human being could
be unadulterated evil simply because he is.
Perhaps we should have expected
this. Mehta is not one to provide easy answers. In his 2017 film Simran, he had Kangana Ranaut playing an
eccentric woman whose journey into crime is motivated not by a grand
catastrophe but by a claustrophobic home, frustration at the workplace and a humdrum
middle-class existence. Yet, while Simran was about a person who could have been you or me gone wrong, Omerta is about someone who looks like
he could have been you or me but is far, far from it.
After chronicling the manner in
which he held four Western tourists hostage in the narrow bylanes of Delhi, the
film travels back a short period to 1992 London, where Sheikh was a student at
LSE leading a comfortable life with his loving father Saeed Sheikh (Keval
Arora). His indoctrination came at the hands of another deceptively normal
seeming person, the trusted local clergyman Maulana Ismail (Rupinder Nagra).
From then on, as it slices
through time and space in editor Aditya Warrior’s hands, Omerta plays out like a crime thriller, the anticipation heightened
at each step by Mandar Kulkarni’s sound work and Ishaan Chhabra’s score.
The glacial coldness with which Sheikh
slips easily into a vile training camp in Pakistan and his terrorist activities
are made all the more unnerving by the run-of-the-mill nature of his early days.
Even as we come to terms with his part in mass murders, the vehement brutality with
which we finally see him work on Pearl’s body – in Omerta’s version of the facts – comes as a punch in the gut.
Anuj Rakesh Dhawan (whose DoP
credits include Simran and Shubh Mangal Saavdhan) does not show the actual beheading on screen, yet manages
to capture every molecule of ruthlessness in that gory scene. Whether in
conveying the essence of a city or portraying such savagery, Dhawan’s camera is
never literal in this film. He respects the audience enough to know that we do
not need to see knife on neck to grasp the horrendousness of that crime.
The lifeblood of Mehta’s film is Rajkummar
Rao who is so much Omar Sheikh that he will for a long time now be the yardstick
against which other actors will be measured if they are cast as Sheikh. That
Rao is an extraordinary actor is beyond debate, but there has been a niggling personality
trait he has not so far been able to shave off in his performances – that clipped
accent, which is easily identifiable as his. In Omerta, even that quirk melts away as the actor disappears into the
character he is playing. Not only does Rao erase his own personality for this
role, he manages to capture the manner in which the chameleon-like Sheikh would
erase his personality in his multiple real-life avatars: as Daniel Pearl’s likeable
Pakistani contact, a friendly British Indian tourist in a flea market in Delhi
and the boy from Southall, the south Asian neighbourhood in London.
Rao’s challenge is that the
camera is on him from start to finish. New York-based actor Timothy Ryan Hickernell’s is that he
barely gets a few minutes and a handful of lines to convince us that he is
Daniel Pearl. His minimalist acting combined with the minimalist writing and
direction ensure that Pearl becomes a full-fledged person in our eyes in those
few scenes, instead of being a mere statistic in Sheikh’s roster of crimes.
Keval Arora is completely
relatable as Sheikh’s affectionate father who knows his son is going down a
dangerous path, objects to his choices, but does little to stop him. The rest
of the supporting cast is just as convincing.
Hansal Mehta’s film (written by
Mehta with a story by Mukul Dev) takes its name from the vocabulary of the
Italian mafia. Encyclopedia Britannica
defines omertà as “the
obligation never, under any circumstances, to apply for justice to the legal
authorities and never to assist in any way in the detection of crimes committed
against oneself or others.”
The title, like the rest of the
film, is not to be taken literally. The authorities, in Mehta and Dev’s view of
Sheikh’s vision, are callous Western superpowers and other exploiters of the Muslim
qaum (India included for the
situation in Kashmir) who will never punish their own and therefore must be brought
to justice by those they have wronged.
Would I like to find out what
Sheikh was as a kid, spend more time with his father and wife, meet his
classmates, friends and child? Certainly, but in another film. Omerta is different. Mehta’s film is as
much terrorography as biography. It does not spell out Sheikh’s motivations in
black and white, but reminds us that the villain of the piece rarely looks like
one and need not have reasons we may identify with, relate to or understand.
Besides, Omerta’s pace is so unrelenting and Rao’s acting so immersive that
it is impossible to turn away from the screen for a single moment of the film’s
compact 97 minutes and 37 seconds. To call it gripping might be an
understatement.
Rating
(out of five stars): ***1/2
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CBFC Rating (India):
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Running time:
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97 minutes 37 seconds
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A version of this review has also been published on Firstpost:
