Om Dar Babar (Swaroop, 1988): Close-Up Cinema, 8.15pm
This film is showing as part of the Deviant Traditions of Desire: Asian Cinema at the Intersection of Folklore and Transgressive Desire season at Close-Up Cinema.
Close-Up Cinema introduction:
To summarise the plot of Om Dar Badar is to attempt
articulating the truly incomprehensible. Steering clear of the modernist
collisions of meaning and desire, Kamal Swaroop spins an 'ism' denying
prism of absurdly fragmented surrealisms, positing Indian society as
intrinsically postmodernist, regardless of prevailing religious
conservatisms and contradictory philosophical musings, or rather,
because of it. On the face of it, the film is a portrait of life in
Ajmer, Rajasthan, telling us the story of a boy named Om during his
carefree adolescence, gifted with the skill of holding his breath for a
long time. His father, Babuji, a government servant, leaves his
government job to dedicate his life to astrology. His sister, with a
sense of independence and agency, dates a spineless good for nothing. He
studies science, but grows increasingly fascinated with magic and
religion, visiting a fantasy city and taking a home close to a frog
pond. Avowedly non-committal to any theme or plot, the film whimsically
satirises the interspersing of Western concepts with Hindu religion,
blending the sacred with the profane, the carnal with the divine, and
antiquity with modernity. In doing so, it mocks the sacred pursuits of
meaning and desire, weaving together an idiosyncratic pastiche of
consciously contradictory nonsense. The kind of nonsense that happily
subverts all cinematic expectations into a satirical anti-cinema of
scientific and religious aphorisms, pseudo moralistic science fiction,
pop mythologies and ingenuously purposeless musical numbers.
Screen Slate review:
Considered an idiosyncratic anomaly during its festival run in 1988 and
an established masterpiece of Indian parallel cinema when it finally
released commercially in India in 2014, Kamal Swaroop’s Om Dar-B-Dar
is no longer a secret. Swaroop acknowledges the inspiration of foreign artists such as Godard,
Warhol, Buñuel, and Man Ray, along with his “teachers,” the giants of
India’s Parallel cinema movement Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani. The
results are a radical combination of surrealist montage and formalist
camerawork and editing – like the montage of Jagdish being caught with
the lock of hair that turns the movie into not only an experimentation
of form but of concept. His screenwriter Kuku’s approach is also
singular, littering his dialogue with non-sequiturs and jocular
double-entendres that jump between Hindi and English – a favorite of
mine is the repeated phrase “frog keychain,” which when said in Hindi
can be understood also as frog ki chaeen, meaning “the frog’s love.” Peerless in its vision and esoteric in its details, Om Dar-B-Dar is a movie that can hold true to the moniker of being “unlike anything you’ve ever seen."
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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