Before O’Romeo, revisiting Vishal Bhardwaj’s Rangoon, an epic romance unfolding against the fiercest tides of violence | Bollywood News
5 min readMumbaiFeb 12, 2026 08:07 AM IST It is 1944. The war is tearing the world apart. History is split in two. Both halves are on fire. On one side, empires are burning. On the other hand, India stands at the edge of its own becoming. Gandhi speaks of resistance without blood. Elsewhere, Subhash Chandra Bose gathers an army, moving through Burma, preparing to answer with violence. Against this fractured geopolitical moment, Vishal Bhardwaj stages Rangoon as an epic romance. Its thesis arrives at the midpoint, just before the interval, and it is distinctly his. There is poetry. There is a song. There is mud. There are two damaged souls. They have taken refuge in what was, until recently, an army base. Tanks surround them like witnesses. The threat of death hangs in the air. And yet they make love. For the first time; in the dirt. They discover love on the ground still scarred by war. Their longing outlives the century’s appetite for blood. In a world engineered for ruin, they choose romance. …