Om Darbadar (1988) (aka Om-Dar-Ba-Dar)
Kamal Swaroop
Hindi
“To Prime Minister. Subject: The Googly. Dear Raju, Please ban googly in cricket and life in general. Thanks, A freedom fighter, Babuji B. Sankar.”
If one is asked to describe briefly what Kamal Swaroop’s Om Darbadar (1988) is, some of the answers could be: carefully constructed non-sense, endless dream of a cinephile, a satire on everything, full stop to Indian parallel cinema, random footage, extremely challenging piece of filmmaking, the great Indian LSD trip, landmark Indian film that aims big. With all the ingredients required to make a cult classic, Om Darbadar is the kind of movie that can easily polarize critics and audiences alike. It is, in fact, surprising that the National Film Development Corporation consented to produce this film. Using image, sound and montage to the maximum extent (and often gratuitously) and dialog that seem like knitted from parts of different sentences, almost always making no meaning (written by Kuku, also the lyricist and the art director of the film), Swaroop’s film is an antithesis to whatever is recognized globally as Indian cinema – a reason good enough to make Om Darbadar a must-see movie.
Here’s the plot of the film: Horoscope, dead frog, cloudy sky, the moon, radio program, caste reservation, bicycle, Mount Everest, women’s liberation, communism, sleeveless blouse, Yuri Gagarin, miniature book, Nitrogen fixation, man on moon, terrorist tadpoles, computer, biology class, turtles, Hema Malini, typewriter, sleazy magazines, hibernation, text inside nose, googly, James Bond, severed tongue, fish rain, shoes in a temple, World War, assassin creed, Gandhi, illicit trade, the lake, goggles, hopping currency, helium breath, counterfeit coins, underwater treasure, diamonds inside frogs, fireworks, the zoo, explosives, town at night, dead man, visit of God, the Panchsheel Pact, foreign tourists, Promise toothpaste, holy men, Fish keychain, Ram Rajya, food chain disruption, anti-cooperation movement, birth control, bagpipes, gecko, Jawaharlal Nehru, Aviation centers, Potassium Cyanide. And I guarantee you, this is as lucid as it can get.
Om Darbadar is, hands down, the most confusing movie I have ever seen and not many movies can come close to dethroning it. Some might propose Buñuel’s first film, but one could at least find one pattern in that work – of anti-narration. This one regularly tantalizes us with a somewhat coherent narrative and just when it seems to get steady, snap! Or Last Year at Marienbad (1961), which is, in fact, an incisive study of the human memory. Om Darbadar, on the other hand, overwhelms us with its utter irreverence for integrity of reality, unity of content and consistency of form. Or the very many avant-garde films of Brakhage, Warhol, Anger, Snow or Smith, which, I believe, have always had a strong theoretical basis. No, this film does not have any single, central factor as its theme or motivation. Of course, one can find shreds here and there in the film that do make it seem like dealing with the idea of identity crisis in suburban India, but that’s strictly on a speculative level.
Often we witness directors claiming to show the world what real India is – a statement negated by the films themselves. Leave alone filming, it is to be accepted that even understanding the dynamics of such a largely diverse country is near impossibility. But, if there was ever a film that attempted to capture the workings of real India almost in its entirety, it has to be this one. Yes, it does bite much more than it can chew, but surely, digestion is not its intention. In a country where science, religion, mythology, arts, politics and philosophy seep into common lives trying to overpower each other, there is no single way to separate these threads so as to examine their influence on the way of life. This is a nation where the apparently inexplicable supernatural walks hand in hand with the most modern of scientific theories (In one scene in the film, Gayatri (Gopi Desai) asks Jagdish (Lalit Tiwari) if women can really climb Mount Everest without the help of men, he tells her: “Why not? After all, goddess Parvati did it”), a culture that is exposed to all the isms of western thinking yet revels in having its own interpretations of them (wearing a sleeveless blouse is equated to emancipation of women) and a country whose emotions are largely dictated by cinema, television and pop culture (Om Darbadar can be seen as a jab at just about every genre in Indian cinema).
Conventional (and good) cinema has relied on the fact that human psychology manifests itself in the form of their behaviour and speech and hence, an unhindered documentation of their lives would help us understand them better. But not many filmmakers seem to have embraced the reverse process – an entry into the real via the surreal. Kolker fittingly calls Buñuel “the neo-realist of the unconscious” and each one of his films testifies that. Likewise, the whole of Om Darbadar could well be the ultimate Freudian exercise that could help us (de)construct the actual world that Om lives in – a world that is as much fuelled by a love for pulp novels and thriller movies as it is by an aversion to zoology. But all is not so simple and the film is far from an extended dream sequence. Swaroop could have easily had Om (or his father, who begins the film’s narration) wake up at the end of the film, thereby taking us back to our comfort zones. Instead, he seamlessly blends present reality, past reality and fantastical reality to create an elusive work of cinema that defies literature, science and rationality.
Om Darbadar is an utterly frustrating, endlessly irritating and supremely hilarious film. Is it nonsensical? Yes, that is precisely its function. Is it pretentious? No, that can happen only when a film attempts to be something. Is it a one-of-a-kind movie viewing experience? You bet. Whatever one calls it, you cannot deny one fact – Om Darbadar is an indubitably addictive and thoroughly riveting piece of work that simultaneously repels a viewer by not pandering to his needs and yet, keeps him hooked on to the screen from frame one. Quarter hour into the film, I was completely disarmed and found myself laughing out loud through the rest of the film despite (rather, because of) the meaninglessness of it all. Om Darbadar is perhaps the kind of vision that flashes moments before one’s death. Call it the birth of Indian cinema, call it its death, call it Dadaist, call it anti-art, but be sure to bask in its absurdity while it lasts.
[Meri Jaan A A A…!]
July 12, 2009 at 1:42 am
Wow! Never knew about this movie. Sounds darn interesting, more so given your passionately written review.
LikeLike
July 13, 2009 at 9:07 am
No write up can be as interesting as this movie itself… Do, do see it.
LikeLike
July 12, 2009 at 11:27 pm
Great writeup as always Srikanth. When I first saw the film some of its style( for eg: Lateral overhead tracking reminded me of Mani Kaul) even they way how everything appears so detached. Yet, I do agree that… this is an unique experience and everyone should at least give it a shot.
Let’s hope we can get a print and show it sometime to the mass audience.
LikeLike
July 13, 2009 at 9:08 am
Oh, Yes… this is a film that has to be kept afloat… Why isn’t this out on DVDs yet? they should be celebrating it. And what ever happened to Swaroop after this film?
LikeLike
July 13, 2009 at 9:55 am
“Let’s hope we can get a print and show it sometime to the mass audience.” – Really risky job… People can easily turn violent…
LikeLike
July 14, 2009 at 9:40 am
sounds like something out of Dali’s daydream. Is it torrent-able?
Oh and fantastic review
LikeLike
July 14, 2009 at 9:44 am
Dali’s daydream when high, I should say.
Fortunately torrent-able.
LikeLike
July 14, 2009 at 10:37 am
[…] Srikanth’s fantastic review of Om Darbadar on Seventh Art I can safely say that the Venkat Prabhu’s version was leaps and bounds better. I had a gut feeling that the he had a firmer grasp on irony than Hopkins ever did (or ever intended), as was evidenced by the humour with which he treats the cowardly nature of the protagonists. In the English version, Stephen Dorff’s fear and insecurities act as a balance to Cuba Gooding’s violent braggadocio and Emilio Estévez’s sense of morality, and we, the audience, are almost told to judge these characters based on their traits. In Saroja, I guess the director’s intention was just for us to point our fingers at the characters and laugh as loud as we can. […]
LikeLike
July 15, 2009 at 4:21 am
No clue what happened to Swaroop. Perhaps, he made few docu works for Film Division and then don’t know. Last year I asked Shahaini a similar question, ” What did you do after your first film Maya Darpan, after all, he never got funding for another 12 years? But his output is way better than Swaroop.
The last I heard about Swaroop was from Anurag Kashyap who said people like Swaroop sit in his house and well spend time there only.
I don’t know whether I should believe this story.
LikeLike
July 15, 2009 at 9:18 am
Ooh… What did Shahani say?
BTW, it would be good if NFDC released DVDs of at least the films it financed…I saw one such DVD here… Arun Kaul’s Diksha
LikeLike
July 17, 2009 at 1:04 am
I don’t recall what he exactly told me. But I regret missing out on the interview with him the next day. I wanted to know more about his works and especially when he was working with Bresson. I read somewhere that when Bresson saw Maya Darpan he said something like ” This is the slowest film he’s ever seen”.
NFDC like always is in red, and god knows, i seriously reiterate again- God, fucking knows. Why they produce films and don’t want to distribute them.
LikeLike
July 17, 2009 at 6:10 pm
It’s kind of funny that BRESSON found the film to be slow :)
LikeLike
July 18, 2009 at 8:06 am
i have been always omless aimless..even if i like sitting at home doing nothing..can’t.
may be in the year 2012….appear all over again..i wish to and will to…spirits don’t have bottoms…..so far….floating around in digital appearences…thanks for reminding of om darbdar
LikeLike
July 18, 2009 at 9:34 am
Mr. Swaroop,
You have created a timeless masterpiece that perhaps no one can emulate. This film has to be celebrated.
If only the film was out on DVDs instead of bootlegs (I’d be the first one to get that), I’m sure the blogosphere will quickly pick it up and spread the glory.
All the best for your current(?) film. Hope we have a reboot to Indian parallel cinema.
Cheers,
LikeLike
September 5, 2012 at 11:07 pm
It is 2012! Time to see through that camera again Mr. Swaroop.
LikeLike
August 6, 2009 at 8:15 pm
i think dvd’s are now available. check with kamal swaroop at thirdpoliceman007@gmail.com
LikeLike
February 17, 2010 at 4:57 pm
Never thought I’d find this movie referenced here. Is is floating around online still? Drew a blank hence….
LikeLike
February 17, 2010 at 4:59 pm
I guess so…
LikeLike
February 21, 2010 at 1:51 am
Plz plz smbdy tell where can I find pankaj advani’s “Urf professor”… I searched through whole of net but couldnt find it.
LikeLike
June 26, 2010 at 11:49 am
‘urf professor’ now available on dingora.com
LikeLike
May 28, 2011 at 5:12 pm
[…] and undeveloped negatives). The Till I saw Pati’s film, I’d thought Kamal Swaroop’s Om-Dar-Ba-Dar (1988) really had no precedent in Indian cinema. Exactly like Swaroop’s pièce de résistance, […]
LikeLike
November 15, 2011 at 11:55 pm
This film deserves to be celebrated. It seems Mr. Swaroop took 3 yrs to write. Writing a ‘normal’ script is somewhat easy, but writing ‘nonsense’ with those nonsensical dialogues which make so much sense, is tough. Lovely edit and great sound design. Waiting for your next one (if there is one!) mr. Swaroop.
LikeLike
November 13, 2012 at 5:06 pm
Reblogged this on and commented:
Om Darbadar (1988) (aka Om-Dar-Ba-Dar)
Kamal Swaroop
Hindi
“To Prime Minister. Subject: The Googly. Dear Raju, Please ban googly in cricket and life in general. Thanks, A freedom fighter, Babuji B. Sankar.”
If one is asked to describe briefly what Kamal Swaroop’s Om Darbadar (1988) is, some of the answers could be: carefully constructed non-sense, endless dream of a cinephile, a satire on everything, full stop to Indian parallel cinema, random footage, extremely challenging piece of filmmaking, the great Indian LSD trip, landmark Indian film that aims big. With all the ingredients required to make a cult classic, Om Darbadar is the kind of movie that can easily polarize critics and audiences alike. It is, in fact, surprising that the National Film Development Corporation consented to produce this film. Using image, sound and montage to the maximum extent (and often gratuitously) and dialog that seem like knitted from parts of different sentences, almost always making no meaning (written by Kuku, also the lyricist and the art director of the film), Swaroop’s film is an antithesis to whatever is recognized globally as Indian cinema – a reason good enough to make Om Darbadar a must-see movie.
Here’s the plot of the film: Horoscope, dead frog, cloudy sky, the moon, radio program, caste reservation, bicycle, Mount Everest, women’s liberation, communism, sleeveless blouse, Yuri Gagarin, miniature book, Nitrogen fixation, man on moon, terrorist tadpoles, computer, biology class, turtles, Hema Malini, typewriter, sleazy magazines, hibernation, text inside nose, googly, James Bond, severed tongue, fish rain, shoes in a temple, World War, assassin creed, Gandhi, illicit trade, the lake, goggles, hopping currency, helium breath, counterfeit coins, underwater treasure, diamonds inside frogs, fireworks, the zoo, explosives, town at night, dead man, visit of God, the Panchsheel Pact, foreign tourists, Promise toothpaste, holy men, Fish keychain, Ram Rajya, food chain disruption, anti-cooperation movement, birth control, bagpipes, gecko, Jawaharlal Nehru, Aviation centers, Potassium Cyanide. And I guarantee you, this is as lucid as it can get.
Om Darbadar is, hands down, the most confusing movie I have ever seen and not many movies can come close to dethroning it. Some might propose Buñuel’s first film, but one could at least find one pattern in that work – of anti-narration. This one regularly tantalizes us with a somewhat coherent narrative and just when it seems to get steady, snap! Or Last Year at Marienbad (1961), which is, in fact, an incisive study of the human memory. Om Darbadar, on the other hand, overwhelms us with its utter irreverence for integrity of reality, unity of content and consistency of form. Or the very many avant-garde films of Brakhage, Warhol, Anger, Snow or Smith, which, I believe, have always had a strong theoretical basis. No, this film does not have any single, central factor as its theme or motivation. Of course, one can find shreds here and there in the film that do make it seem like dealing with the idea of identity crisis in suburban India, but that’s strictly on a speculative level.
Often we witness directors claiming to show the world what real India is – a statement negated by the films themselves. Leave alone filming, it is to be accepted that even understanding the dynamics of such a largely diverse country is near impossibility. But, if there was ever a film that attempted to capture the workings of real India almost in its entirety, it has to be this one. Yes, it does bite much more than it can chew, but surely, digestion is not its intention. In a country where science, religion, mythology, arts, politics and philosophy seep into common lives trying to overpower each other, there is no single way to separate these threads so as to examine their influence on the way of life. This is a nation where the apparently inexplicable supernatural walks hand in hand with the most modern of scientific theories (In one scene in the film, Gayatri (Gopi Desai) asks Jagdish (Lalit Tiwari) if women can really climb Mount Everest without the help of men, he tells her: “Why not? After all, goddess Parvati did it”), a culture that is exposed to all the isms of western thinking yet revels in having its own interpretations of them (wearing a sleeveless blouse is equated to emancipation of women) and a country whose emotions are largely dictated by cinema, television and pop culture (Om Darbadar can be seen as a jab at just about every genre in Indian cinema).
Conventional (and good) cinema has relied on the fact that human psychology manifests itself in the form of their behaviour and speech and hence, an unhindered documentation of their lives would help us understand them better. But not many filmmakers seem to have embraced the reverse process – an entry into the real via the surreal. Kolker fittingly calls Buñuel “the neo-realist of the unconscious” and each one of his films testifies that. Likewise, the whole of Om Darbadar could well be the ultimate Freudian exercise that could help us (de)construct the actual world that Om lives in – a world that is as much fuelled by a love for pulp novels and thriller movies as it is by an aversion to zoology. But all is not so simple and the film is far from an extended dream sequence. Swaroop could have easily had Om (or his father, who begins the film’s narration) wake up at the end of the film, thereby taking us back to our comfort zones. Instead, he seamlessly blends present reality, past reality and fantastical reality to create an elusive work of cinema that defies literature, science and rationality.
Om Darbadar is an utterly frustrating, endlessly irritating and supremely hilarious film. Is it nonsensical? Yes, that is precisely its function. Is it pretentious? No, that can happen only when a film attempts to be something. Is it a one-of-a-kind movie viewing experience? You bet. Whatever one calls it, you cannot deny one fact – Om Darbadar is an indubitably addictive and thoroughly riveting piece of work that simultaneously repels a viewer by not pandering to his needs and yet, keeps him hooked on to the screen from frame one. Quarter hour into the film, I was completely disarmed and found myself laughing out loud through the rest of the film despite (rather, because of) the meaninglessness of it all. Om Darbadar is perhaps the kind of vision that flashes moments before one’s death. Call it the birth of Indian cinema, call it its death, call it Dadaist, call it anti-art, but be sure to bask in its absurdity while it lasts.
[Meri Jaan A A A…!]
LikeLike
January 7, 2014 at 8:26 pm
[…] To read more about the film, click here and […]
LikeLike
January 22, 2014 at 11:21 am
Well, at least now I know it’s not wrong that I can’t think of a (for lack of a better term) weirder film.
Honestly, though, this is a little bit of a cop-out, no? To just declare that the film’s purpose, inasmuch as it has one. is inscrutable and that there’s no underlying order… it’s something that I can’t bring myself to respect very much.
Now, it is true that a film may be nonsense to serve its function, but then our job here would be to talk about all the ways the nonsense-yness actually helps it serve its function. (A job I am extremely ill-equipped to perform, just to be clear.)
[This is extremely critical-sounding I guess – but I assure you that I wouldn’t even bother to say this if I didn’t think highly of you in the context.]
LikeLike
January 22, 2014 at 11:28 am
To illustrate: anti-narrative is a rather good insight into the sort of things Un Chien Adnalou is trying to do, because watching it through that frame explains a non-trivial amount of the film and its choices.
As it stands, however, your review and even more so others’ fail to distinguish this film from nonsense arbitrarily decided to be great. (And I really liked this film a lot, so I’d like to be able to distinguish it.)
LikeLike
January 22, 2014 at 11:31 am
Hey Ronak, To say that it is nonsensical without explaining why that is necessary or what purpose it serves, is certainly a cop out. No questions about that. That is also precisely the stance that turned me off when I read the recent reactions to the film. Strangely enough, I barely have a clue where I was coming from when I wrote this review. But having seen the film again last week, I guess I am a little better equipped – that is surely the word, given I am comparing me with the guy who wrote this review – to understand its workings. Hopefully I’ll be able to write something on the film again.
Cheers!
LikeLike
January 22, 2014 at 11:32 am
Awesome! I’m hoping the same too.
LikeLike
November 17, 2014 at 5:24 pm
There are many movies like this in foreign cinema.. some movies are better than this one and some aren’t up to the mark.. one of this kind movie is “the holly mountain” .. such movies are always hard to digest but fun to chew.. Luis Bunuel is the founder of this genre “Surrealism Cinema” and he remains one. However i do appreciate the efforts of Kamal Swaroop.. he did his best
LikeLike
May 13, 2017 at 12:51 pm
If you are keen to understand the dialectics of life in a post modern day
India, then Om Dar– B–Dar illustrates this most brilliantly. Swaroop
helps us realize that TRUTH can never be embellished. However, we see
it being perceived and tested through time honored dialectics. Director Swaroop helps us realize that notwithstanding what religion we Indians follow, we have to virtually survive amidst utter chaos and harsh socio-eocnomic
realities. Somewhere in between our religion, which we blindly
believe; and our struggle for a bare existence, is a vast vulnerable
space that is reserved for bigotry, dogma, superstition, occult sciences, tantric ritual practices. Most of us survive by eking a livelihood to place food on the table for our family. There are however, those who thrive on our
vulnerability to become suckers to meaningless superstition, concocted occult or fraudulent astrology. We believe that we can improve our plight or worth through hacks that are suggested by astrologers, tantrics and priests who suggest Parihara Kriyas (tantric remedial action to redeem our sins). In the movie, modern day science instead of challenging this mumbo-jumbo becomes incidental to all this and adds more chaos to confusion.
This exactly is what Om Dar-B-Dar illustrates through its most
colorful and brilliant montages, whacky dialogues, sardonic narrations et al. Watch it again and then after some days once again. It’s time tested TRUTHS!!!
LikeLike
November 12, 2019 at 11:16 pm
Beautiful review. Thanks a ton
Bhu
LikeLike
March 26, 2020 at 12:20 am
I enjoyed this review and your plot description while looking for answers. This movie is currently playing on mubi.com for another few days. It’s beautiful and somewhat confusing, will re-watch it for sure.
LikeLike
March 26, 2020 at 12:21 am
I enjoyed this review and your plot description while looking for answers. This movie is currently playing on mubi.com for another few days. It’s beautiful and somewhat confusing, will re-watch it for sure.
LikeLike
April 13, 2020 at 7:46 pm
It gives me great pleasure to see someone write about this film critically. I caught it recently on Mubi and I am still shocked by its lack of critical analyses. Great review as always, though I do hope, as indicated by you in the comments, that you could perhaps delve a little deeper in another article (perhaps even find out what happened to Swaroop too). I wrote about the film and its postmodern aesthetic on my blog: https://contentiouscriticism.wordpress.com/2020/04/01/western-indians-and-the-conflict-of-values-om-dar-b-dar/
LikeLike