Om-Dar-Ba-Dar is one of Indian cinema's best kept secrets. As trippy as any movie by Paradjanov or Jodorowsky, Om-Dar-Ba-Dar was, until the past year, the only feature film directed by Kamal Swaroop. After a brief stint in the international festival circuit, the film disappeared from public view and became something of legend among Indian cinephiles, never really getting the international attention it deserved. With the recent released of the restoration, this may finally begin to change. Om-Dar-Ba-Dar is ostensibly about a young boy named Om, and his coming-of-age in a fantastical town. Om is blessed with the ability to hold his breath underwater for extended periods of time. On a superficial level, Om-Dar-Ba-Dar resembles Fellini's Amarcord, but Swaroop's child is a beast of its own. Interspersed with surreal musical numbers, documentary footage, dreams and fantasies, and absurd comedy, this is a uniquely Indian film; one that could not have been made anywhere else. I will not even pretend to claim that I understood maybe even a fourth of the specific cultural elements, and a great deal of the film, especially the various linguistic puns, is obviously lost in translation, but the film also bursts at the seams with a kaleidoscopic cinematic energy and emotional universality. One does not exactly have to understand what they are seeing to feel it. That is the miracle of the cinema. There are images of fantastical visual beauty here, images that are colorful and bizarre, transmitted from another world obtuse to our own, but somehow familiar; it is storytelling seeped in mythology, but ancient and popular. The only problem with the film is not a fault of its own; but much of it, as stated already, really is lost in translation. But what is not, what is universal, is of such striking beauty.
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