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| Lester James Peries |
It has been more than 50 years since
Lester James Peries made his third film, Gamperaliya.
Since that time a lot has happened – armed insurrections, political turmoil, a
civil war, and of course the inevitable changes of attitude from one generation
to the other. Lester remains a potent force in this country, notwithstanding
all those cacophonies, for the vision he so painstakingly maintained in his
films in them all: take one of his earlier films and compare them with a more
contemporary work, and you will find only small, hardly noticeable differences.
He has been
called the “lonely artist”. But, as someone once noted, aren’t all artists,
working from a genuine sense of art, lonely until their audiences realise their
worth? To me a more fitting title would be the “adamant artist” – what better
phrase, after all, can sum up a filmmaker who for 50 years has never once
swerved from his vision for the sake of novelty and experiment?
But while
fixing this label or that on him maybe easy, it is no light task to find out
what exactly it is that binds all his films together. In fact, I’m inclined to
believe there are several. When compared with most of today’s directors –
Christopher Nolan, Tim Burton, the Wachowski Brothers – whose motifs can be at
once identified from the way they’ve been displayed for all to see, Lester is a
filmmaker whose style can elude us at times. Why?
For the
simple reason that, unlike Nolan’s emotionless, cold psychology of characters,
Lester is a filmmaker who is less concerned with on-the-surface, immediate
plotlines, instead focusing on the innermost core of his stories. The Batman
Trilogy, so noted for its innovative spark and style, seems to totter and limp
along when compared to the intricate nuances of emotion caught in Lester’s
films.
With his
films one is immediately reminded of the most sublime of symphonies –
Beethoven’s Fifth, for instance – where the key motif, played every few minutes
or so, is relayed to us so subtly, that unless we crane our ears to listen, we
can easily miss it. And yet, without it, the whole composition can lose its
meaning.
“The
greatest musical instrument we have in this country”. That was Lester writing
on Amaradeva. Well, the same can be said of him, if we are to change it and
describe him as the “greatest camera” we can ever get – even today. “You feel
as if the camera was eavesdropping on life, catching people unawares, capturing
forever their … shifts of feeling”. That was Lester writing on Satyajit Ray.
Well, the same can be said of him, if we are to accord him the status of a
camera’s delicate vision.
But what
exactly makes up his cinema? The question, vague to some, is, I think, best
answered by examining the patterns that bind his films together. If I were
asked to name one such pattern, it would be this – an economy of emotion, which
I think underscores sympathy for his characters.
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| Delovak Athara |
Sometimes –
as with Sandeshaya and Weera
Puran Appu – he delved into a
superficially romantic universe where good combated with evil. But in almost
every other film, his characters are essentially redeemable, though still
tainted with flaws. There are instances in his films where seemingly “good”
characters suddenly reveal their darker side. To me this is best shown in the
character of Piyal, from Gamperaliya,
who in a fit of jealousy declares heartlessly to Nanda that, if it wasn’t for
his money, she would never have been able to perform the last rites for her
dead husband.
Cézanne had
a lifelong obsession with the apple in his paintings. Van Gogh had one with
cypresses. Well, Lester James Peries had his career-long obsession too: with
the family. For him it was the emotional centre that guided his stories. One
need only look at his films to see how indispensable it is to their plots. The
protagonist’s dilemma in Delovak
Athara is intensified by a
doting mother and father; the emotional imbalance of the male lover in Golu Hadawatha is at least partly soothed by the
unconditional love of a brother and sister-in-law; and the degradation of
traditional values in Kaliyugaya is highlighted by the
deteriorating relationship between Nanda and Piyal.
It's no small wonder that, in Awaragira and Yuganthaya – two films that were slightly
criticised in their time – the family becomes disintegrated and alienating to
its characters, which in turn underscores the faulty lines that break apart,
sometimes violently (Awaragira ends
with two murders), at the end. For Lester the family was indispensable to his
stories. Without it, he seemed to be saying, no world would survive for long.
It is a testament to this obsession with it that his last two films, Wekanda Walauwwa and Ammawarune,
were enriched and almost beatifying in their portrayal of the mother, the
emotional centre of the Sri Lankan family.
He had his
detractors, of course – critics who saw in his concern with middle-class
families and individuals the mark of an indifferent elitist; audiences that
grew irritated by long passages of silence; and certain directors who saw in
his concern for individuals a shying away from more socially-pronged
storylines. To paraphrase a saying of Hitchcock, Lester did not seem to them to
have gone beyond his usual proscenium arch.
Only the
foggiest mindsets, it can safely be said, could have moved them to such
conclusions. Certainly, long passages of silence abound in his films. But they
are instrumental to his vision of the “minutest changes in sensibility” making
up the “true drama” of cinema. For him, the gentle look of tenderness, the
subtlest change in mood, reveals more about his characters’ intentions than any
expressive or emotional outbursts (that seems to make up most of what goes for
“good” cinema here today).
I can think
of so many examples from his films – the carousel sequence in Golu Hadawatha, the heroine’s
transformation into a virtuous woman by the mirror in Ran Salu, and the waltz in Nidhanaya. These reveal the
innermost core of the characters in them, be it Sugath’s feeling of betrayal at
seeing his former lover riding on the carousel with another man, or Willie
Abeynayaka’s growing tenderness for his wife in that three-minute dance
sequence. As no words are registered in these instances, I think it is best to
describe them as belonging purely to the cinema: no play or novel could have
replicated their intensity.
If I may go
further, I would even deign to call these sequences as examples of Pure Cinema
– where all the resources of the film medium are used to awaken an
un-definable, almost spiritually transcendental feeling in all of us. It is no
small wonder that his films share much with the tradition of Satyajit Ray and
Yasujiro Ozu – two directors who, like Lester, portrayed evocatively and
sympathetically the lives of the people they featured in their stories. The
same, it can be said, goes for every other filmmaker, both during and after his
time, who is comparable to him: all, like him, following in the tradition of
Western humanism.
Slowness of
pace, therefore, though antithetical to a society that prefers knife-edge
cutting and nimble, on-the-surface tension to a gradual development of plot and
character, is his hallmark: it has been for all his films, even, as Sandeshaya shows, in his less than acclaimed
departures.
One can
imagine a hostile reception greeting his first few films – Rekava and Gamperaliya were not successful at the box-office
– until, in Golu Hadawatha,
he finally achieved what even the most serious, least commercial artists
wanted: public acceptance. It has been nearly 60 years since Rekava was made, and Lester James Peries
still remains the much loved artist, in Sri Lanka, he has always aspired to,
and has always been.
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