Hansal Mehta’s Omerta is the flip side of his own Shahid . Both the biographical films are about young Muslim men undergoing life-altering experiences in the contemporary conflicted and brutal world. However, while Shahid decides to fight for justice in the face of the many injustices heaped on him, his polar opposite, Omar, takes to violence.
Mehta fashions a taut and terse tale about the British-Pakistani terrorist Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, from the point where he kidnaps four Western tourists in India in 1994 to murdering the Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002, right up until bringing India and Pakistan to the brink of war post 26/11. The documentary-like feel gets enhanced by the use of actual news footage to make it all seem hyper real. Then there is Rajkummar Rao to make it effective with his dour and deadpan turn as Omar, even though his British accent does get a tad overbearing.
- Director: Hansal Mehta
- Starring: Rajkummar Rao, Rajesh Tailang
- Storyline: A look into the life of British-Pakistani terrorist Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh
- Run time: 97 minutes
Yet Omerta can’t rise above the clinical. A film that holds the promise of taking you into the mind of a dreaded terrorist merely skims the surface and doesn’t go beyond showing you his many violent acts. There are references to Bosnia and Guantanamo Bay but how do they affect and change a milk-drinking, chess-playing nerd into a ruthless killer? How does ethnic cleansing and victimisation lead to the radicalisation of Omar remains implicit rather than explored. Yes there are the odd lines, – “You have been killing me for a long time now. It’s my chance to kill you” – and the jehadist camps, sleeper cells and urban warfare or his burst of rage in the prison at the fellow Muslim inmate for not doing roza . But these glimpses are few and far between, punctuating a narrative which largely moves from one slaying to another to a climactic tortuous butchering.
Back in 1997, Udayan Prasad’s My Son The Fanatic , based on Hanif Kureishi’s short story by the same name, gave a fascinating insight into the relationship between a tolerant Muslim taxi driver and his fundamentalist son, who decides to give up his guitar for God. There was a similar possibility here what with Omar’s father confessing to the maulana about the fear of losing his son. That sense of a young life going waste for a lost cause doesn’t get conveyed. All you are left with at the end of the film is a lurking dread of young, educated, bespectacled, geeky men in skull caps.
