Romeo

Director : Sujit Mandal

Writer : Samaresh Majumdar

Cast: Dev,Shubhasree,Sabyasachi Chakraborty,Laboni Sarkar,

Biswajeet Chakraborty,Koushik Banerjee and others

Romeo,unlike what the title suggests,is not really about a ‘Romeo’ who flirts around with girls left,right and centre. It is an image Siddhartha (Dev) has carefully constructed to hide the tragedy of a life marred by parents who separated when he was only a little boy. He does not even know what caused the estrangement that took his father away to distant US. When Pooja (Subhashree) arrives to study in a city college,she is initially repulsed by his brash and arrogant manner but soon reads the sadness that rules his life. When they fall in love and wish to marry,Pooja’s father refuses because Siddhartha is from a broken home. Siddharth promises to reunite his parents to gain his consent.

Romeo marks a distinct departure from Dev’s general screen oeuvre of exuding an image of the action hero who dots his action with some romance shot in foreign locales. The romance part is taken care of with song-dance sequences shot in Mumbai,Cape Town and Singapore. But they are frills to attract the masses to a serious story of a young man who is lost between separated parents and finds that their separation is thwarting his love life too.

Dev has tried to put in his best in an emotionally-charged role with a little violence and a title song that is picturised very well to project the image Siddharth places on public display. But the other characters and he appear very stiff in emotional scenes with their hands stuck to their sides as if they are responding to an ‘attention’ command in a physical training class. He injects life into the several shades of Siddharth’s character especially in scenes like the one when he tells his father,‘Situations are always beyond our control,dad,it is love that remains within our control.’ The father-son scenes offer some of the high points of the film. Subhashree as Pooja could have done better if the director and the script gave her greater scope. Almost every frame is filled with the larger-than-life image of Dev. Siddharth’s readiness to surrender everything,including his family name,to love is brought across lucidly. Sabyasachi looks tired in several scenes but that might be an emotional touch added for effect. Laboni as the mother looks too good to be true in her designer saris and just-so hairdos and looks quite artificial. Koushik Banerjee is very good as Pooja’s unrelenting father.

Jeet Ganguly’s music,specially the theme song,is another high-point of Romeo while the art direction is too jarring even within the upper-class ambience the film projects. Rabiranjan Moitra’s editing is fitting for a film that hardly makes many demands on clipping a two-and-a-half hour-long film that drags terribly towards the end.

Ratings : One star each for Dev,the dialogues,and the overall direction.