Om Dar-B-Dar (1988)

 

Director: Kamal Swaroop

Screenplay: Kuku

Cast: Aditya Lakhia as Om; Anita Kanwar as Phoolkumari; Gopi Desai as Gayatri; Lalit Tiwari as Jagdish; Lakshminarayan Shastri as Om's Father

An Abstract List Candidate

 

...in the cheap feverish thrills of porn pictures of Coca-Cola, I croak...

Made in 1988, Kamal Swaroop's Om Dar-B-Dar would only get a release in 2014 in its homeland. Trying to decipher the film is inherently a challenge - a film as much based on non- sequitur and dream logic as it has structures - but that adds a greater weight. In context to Indian cinema, this is unique and incredible as, in any context of any nation's cinema, it is bizarre and inventive.

Contextually, "Om" (Aditya Lakhia) is a boy, christened as his name so not to be found in the messenger of Death's book. Able to breathe underwater for a long time, Om will eventually be pushed towards becoming a spiritual leader, sponsored by a watch company, who will reject the breath of Lord Brahma, the Hindi God who created the universe, by a mass holding of breath across the country. Long beforehand is his home life, the astrology obsessed man and his daughter Gayatri (Gopi Desai), who comes into a relationship with a man named Jagdish (Lalit Tiwari) when she goes to a cinema on her own, another woman who comes to their home as an actress fleeing a creator of "mystical" films on the gods, and a possible conspiracy with diamonds involving a "primitive shit-land" where the frogs on the grounds breed the rare stones.

Om Dar-B-Dar is, beautifully, a very strange film. Legitimately surreal and in its own way subversive, even the dialogue (for the version I viewed) is censored if translated in the subtitles still, usually surrounding sex references such as the actress being suggested to an adult film writer. Certainly, the film is in constant flux in terms of what the plot line actually is about, but it feels precise, a haze dream with a semblance of logic but is totally against full interpretation. On its mind is certainly a lot of context which would prove more meaningful if you knew Indian culture. That Om's family origins are in having faked their caste, pretending to be of the Brahmin caste, which was of great status in terms of influence especially in the British colonial era and, in this context, has haunted the patriarch. That it is brazenly (even censored) playing with the iconography of Indian cinema is there. There is even a good old Bollywood song, a good one in a film full of good music, which it turns into its own, set in the gritty real streets at night of a city, with bright lights, set to a song whose lyrics (rhyming "It is a like a sea baby" with a merchant lady) fit the film's stream of consciousness absurdities.

In fact, if any moment in a film of great moments, won me over to the exceptional nature of Om Dar-B-Dar, as an abstract film and cinema in general, the early passage when Om is still in school has it.  Among fellow students refusing to get off their bicycles permanently and a teacher who can still hit a student inside a room psychically from the outside, it has the least expected of musical numbers. One, even in a national cinema which has gladly embraced other culture's musical and brought them to theirs, which offers a very individualistic track. Namely, what can be described as Indian Kraftwerk, for a lack of a better term, involving "porn pictures of Coca-Cola" among other dreamlike, post-modern and almost cut-up strange lyrics as teen boys dance in a trance to the music in their classroom. It is an exceptional sequence, a musical montage, and among many aspects, it still feels incredibly ageless in moments like this.

It still feels radical especially as, whilst it slows down in the latter half, the first has a lot of scenes which jump ahead in an unknown time suddenly, time skipping ahead as the editing burns through events whilst still feeling as you can grasp what time you are in. Eventually the film, with its dialogue being increasingly strange, does become alien in its oddness, but you have enough grasp even in the first half to have sympathy of the characters. The astrological and mystic charm obsessed patriarch who, alongside a history clearly in left-wing radicalism, also has a hatred for the "goggly" (whatever that is) wishing for it to be banned from cricket and Indian culture in general. The daughter, whose flirtation with the man in the cinema includes requesting the same song on the radio, about a shepherd in a doll, with its innuendo being a symbol of their teasing interactions. The actress, who was only allowed to play a tiger goddess to not besmirch the real deity's sacredness, fleeing and brought in to be the patriarch's secretary. And Om himself, a trickster at points, bringing a man counterfeit coins raining from the sky, but generally a likable kid.

Playful in both visuals and language, Om Dar-B Dar does so in different ways. The film's dialogue, both in its native language but also in snippets of English is taken advantage of, bilingualism found in Bollywood films with certain phrases and words, poetry in its sentences and even how characters retort to each other playfully. In terms of the look of the film, it is not as exaggerated. It has a very realistic, grounded reality of both the countryside and bustling urban centres which helps make the absurdities and breaks more striking. Certainly a huge factor to the film working in its tone is that, because of its grounded aesthetic, there are sequences which are less absurdist but allow you to follow the characters are individuals. You have as much time to follow a period where Om accidentally/deliberately loses a person's bicycle as it is to the Indian Kraftwerk sequence. It also means that some of the odder aspects are more more bizarre.

The frogs who have diamonds in their stomachs is stranger with the contrast in the film as a result, which come to be as the patriarch has a man ingest grounded up diamonds, and gestate them to eventually defecate out in a secret open field when no one is looking, never seen explicitly but profane in an Indian film playing with the idea of shit with that word (or equivalent) never censored. When suddenly, when they are no longer a secret and school children who found them in their dissected amphibians mob the land, it becomes weirder as a result with the world built up from reality than an equally broad world, especially as an unexpected body count comes to be when toy guns suddenly become real.

When the push to a spiritual leader for Om happens, it is prompted by advertising, when Promise toothpaste suddenly appears in shot and convinces a close female friend to go to him, winning him over to a promotional deal as their spokesperson. Even after two viewings just to get to this review, Om Dar-B-Dar is a dense film to try to unwrap its weird logic, but certainly its juxtaposition of a very grounded, very modern filmmaking style with surreal whimsy are surprisingly good bedfellows who help each other immensely. Certainly, and impossible not to see, is that the film whilst so breezy and light-hearted is still in context to its country's culture and cinema very crude and subversive on purpose, gladly raising references to birth control and sex. It's style of generally going against conventions is part of this too, both the template of a grounded drama and having that against truly weird, deliberately erratic content based on word and language puns as it is randomness which is wonderfully poetic. It is easy to miss how subversive the film is in its glee, but that in itself, is to a viewer's reward. Its abrupt release in its homeland is befitting, as much part of a prank as the content is, but Om Dar-B-Dar deserves as appropriately odd historical context as the film deserves greater awareness as an incredible piece.

Abstract Spectrum: Surreal/Whimsical/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High