On a Quiet Note

Produced by film journalist L Rambabu Varma, Om claims the film is more complex than Singeetham Srinivasa Rao’s 1987 silent film Pushpak (starring Kamal Haasan and Amala). “I loved Pushpak, but it was very simple. My film is not at all like it.”

Budget was, as expected, a constraint and the commercially-oriented Telugu cinema is not known to be open to experimentation. But after the appreciation and success that films like Show (a two-character film which won several awards last year) managed to get, young film-makers have been encouraged to break some mainstream rules.

“These days, small-budget films are in. But even that genre is getting overexposed, so my film had to be really different,” Om says. “Deciding to do a silent film was the easy part. The tough part was actually doing it.”

Writing the film turned out to be more time-consuming and draining than Om expected. He had to consciously picks moments where words were redundant.

“It shouldn’t feel as if words were required and we did without dialogue. For every scene, four options opened up,” describes Om, “We took the path least explored. Sometimes, it took a week to write a single scene. The music (by Indi-pop group Aryans) is also designed specially so that it is almost like dialogue. The song sequences are such that lyrics aren’t needed.”

But won’t people see a film like Adbhut as an oddity? “I think,” he replies, “oddity can be a plus or a minus. This one’s a love story, a comedy, a fairy tale, a bit of sci-fi too—people will find it difficult to categorise. But their curiosity will be aroused.”

Made on a shoestring budget (Om laughingly asks us to guess how much), the director says that he was forced to star in Adbhut because he couldn’t afford an actor. So he’s naturally all praise for Nandana, who “threw no attitude at all, considering she’s Amartya Sen’s daughter”. The actress in question has travelled the globe through her offers. After Gautam Ghose’s Gudiya, she returned to do Bokshu: The Myth and several ad films including Pizza Hut and Everyuth.

Despite its budget, Om says Adbhut’s production designs haven’t suffered. “Producers would tell me, ‘Take as much money as you want to act’, but they wouldn’t give Rs 10 lakh for an offbeat film. Now directors say enviously, ‘You are a director yourself, you don’t need us’.”

And in spite of his reluctance to act, Om has started getting offers in Mumbai for his “cute” hero kind of looks. At the moment, however, he’s concentrating on his film.

Adbhut is scheduled to release in June, in two versions. A longer one for the domestic audience and a shorter one for the international market. “At least, it will face no language barrier,” he concludes.