La locandina è uno spettacolo. Diretto da Kamal Swaroop, e proiettato nel 1988 in prima mondiale al Berlin International Film Festival, Om Dar-B-Dar non ha mai giovato di una vera distribuzione, malgrado gli apprezzamenti della critica internazionale. La pellicola nel corso degli anni è assurta al rango di cult movie, e registi del calibro (anche commerciale) di Imtiaz Ali e di Anurag Kashyap la citano come fonte di ispirazione. Udite udite: la versione restaurata di Om Dar-B-Dar, non solo è stata presentata in prima mondiale al Festival Internazionale del Film di Roma 2013, ma il 17 gennaio 2014 è stata finalmente distribuita in India, in alcune sale selezionate, per la delizia dei suoi estimatori. Trailer. Ne approfitto per segnalarvi l'articolo One head scratcher of a movie!, di Mayank Shekhar, pubblicato da Open il 23 gennaio 2014:
'While the disjointed film defies description, it has enough genres heaped on to it, recurrent ones being ‘post-modern’ and ‘avantgarde’. (...) Kamal Swaroop’s Om Dar-B-Dar seems like a response to Indian cinema’s serious, self-conscious art-house movies of the 70s and 80s that stated such obvious truths about the human condition. The film is instantly surreal, making it an expression of subconscious thoughts, or dreams. (...)
The Government-run National Film Development Corporation produced Om Dar-B-Dar. Swaroop had strong credentials. He had graduated in direction from FTII [Film and Television Institute of India], Pune. (...) He assisted Richard Attenborough on Gandhi (...). For his directorial debut, he approached the NFDC with a completely linear synopsis of his script, which is clearly not how he eventually filmed it. The producers must have been shocked by the outcome.
Om Dar-B-Dar didn’t get a release. The film went straight to the cans, instead of Cannes; however, it did premiere at Berlin. It didn’t make it to the Government’s Indian Panaroma section that ensures screenings at State sponsored festivals. Miraculously enough, it picked up the Best Film (critics) prize at Filmfare Awards, which was then more than merely a television event. A thoroughly-confused Censor Board at the time didn’t grant the film a viewing certificate. They believed that while they couldn’t make head or tail of the movie, there must be subliminal, subversive messages being transmitted through it that may adversely affect an unsuspecting public. (...)
The brass band section in the song Emosanal Attyachar from Anurag Kashyap’s Dev. D (2009) is evidently homage to the Om Dar-B-Dar track Meri Jaan AAA, which is also the song Natha’s son hums when his father disappears in Anusha Rizvi’s Peepli [Live] (2010). My favourite number in the film is Bablu Babylon Se. (...)
The film, in chaste Sanskritised Hindi, is a hallucinatory journey from adolescence to late teenage of young Om, who is an astrologer’s son. If you sit down to follow that story, chances are you’ll lose your mind. Deliberately hammy actors add to the humour. Swaroop says he took about three years to figure out a script, spending most of that time discarding any aspect in it that seemed like a film. He argues that if you merely remove sex and violence from a movie, it stops looking like one. (...)
Swaroop says he drew heavily from free-spirited Maithili-Hindi-Bengali writer Rajkamal Chaudhary from Mahisi in north Bihar. Chaudhary’s writings effortlessly merged ‘American pop literature with Indian literary traditions, delving strongly in self-exorcism and black magic’. Chaudhary is often credited with one of the earliest references to lesbianism in a Hindi novel, Machhali Mari Hui, which is one of the books that Swaroop claims primarily inspired Om Dar-B-Dar. Chaudhary died of syphilis at the age of 38 in 1967. Swaroop, 61, hasn’t made a feature since Om Dar-B-Dar'.
