Om Dar-B-Dar trailer

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Absurdist epic OM DAR-B-DAR is a pure outsider invention in Indian cinema, a shot at romance, religion, and commerce from the rocky hills of the northern province Rajasthan. The film showed at the Berlin film festival in 1988, but was instantly condemned to obscurity back at home where censors slapped it with an “adult” rating, assuring that it would never reach theaters. Were they befuddled by its barrage of nonsense, non-sequitur, and dream? Or did they find something overwhelmingly subversive in a film with such broad, if jumbled, satiric targets, complete dismissal of Indian filmmaking norms, and hero who, perhaps inspired by tadpoles refusing to metamorphose into frogs, inadvertently starts a religion and leads a mass revolt of suspended breath.

The film follows a family of iconoclasts. Father Babuji, after losing his job in a government office for issuing counterfeit Brahmin caste certificates to beggars, takes up astrology and calls his son Om to evade name-based astrological time-of-death predictions. Gayatri, the elder child is an independent unmarried 30-year-old who sits in the men’s section at the cinema and wonders if women will soon be climbing Everest without need of men. She eventually accepts the romantic overtures of layabout Jagadish because they request the same pop song on the radio and he attempts a love spell with a lock of her hair, but exercises her sexual agency in a hilariously Freudian anti-love scene. Om, for his part, runs away from home and leads the plot into a mass of convolutions involving a curse, a shoe filled with diamonds, and a few inadvertent miracles. Soon his ability to seemingly manifest wealth and hold his breath underwater, like the tadpoles of his biology classes, attracts religious followers, documentary filmmakers, and marketing personnel from PROMISE toothpaste.

It’s in the nature of this wild, often rigorously inexplicable film that sowing confusion takes on a renegade significance, and no two synopses written for it ever seem to describe the same story. Which you can take to mean that I’m able to provide only a smattering of its anarchic charms and mysteries in my own. For the rest, you’ll have to see it.

After 25 years in the wilderness, the film was at last restored and released to theaters in 2014. Director Kamal Swaroop, after a series of documentaries, has plans for a new feature. While this is all great news, in light of present events, it is worth noting that dissenting and minority voices are most important in their time, not buried for a quarter of a century to be safely lauded only much later.

CW: Contains some unnecessary frog violence.

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