If you see this serene sincere unadorned family film after reading some of the underwhelming reviews you would wonder, what those blindsighted reviewers were watching! It couldn’t be this charming little vegetarian concoction about a perpetually disgruntled father and his trying-to-remain-calm son, played by two actors who know their job and do it without fuss or self-congratulation.
This tiny beauty of a film gets its strength from Yadav and Jha. Raghubir Yadav is gratingly aggressive as Hari Prasad, a typical retired homebound patriarch in a working-class home in Bhopal, who throws his weight around on his sweet-natured main-nashta-lagati-hoon wife (Soni Razdan) and grown-up children who are treated as if they never grew up. Or may, never proved it.
The father-son equation is treated by writer-director Harsh Vyas with considerable compassion and sensitivity. The authentic ambience helps tremendously. Half the film is set in the congested bylanes of Bhopal, and the other half is on the ghats of Varanasi(which look curiously decongested).
Both the locations serve as the combined hero of the proceedings, conferring the over-familiar conflict with some vigour, though not enough.
The narration neither tries to augment the familiar drama with appended crises, nor is it sold on trying to be one-up on all the father-son conflicts which have swept into the cinema space in recent months and years. Daughters, I am afraid, have taken a backseat.
The most cherishable virtue of this subdued family drama is its ingenuousness. Neither the direction nor the lensing (Rakesh Rawat) plays games with the audience’s perception. As a matter of fact the characters often seem unprepared for the camera.
There is a sense of unrehearsed spontaneity in the way the Prasad family moves in… shall we say… unmysterious ways. In spirit and in theme Om Ka Hari comes closest to Nithish Sahadev’s Malayalam film Falimy from which this charming Barajatya-with-a-heart drama seems to draw its inspiration.
Some may crib about the placid pacing. But that is actually where Om Ka Hari scores the maximum points. It is willing to go along with the rhythm of day-to-day life without worrying about who is watching.
