Our children and our cinema

Two months ago, while I was on my way home, I ran into a storm that threatened to turn the city I was in into a merciless, never-ending river. The driver of the van I was in was frustrated, the traffic outside looked interminable, and the rain didn’t stop: it kept on coming back. We took a detour and drove through a shortcut into a road that was, unfortunately, so small that every other driver and vehicle that had decided to drive into it found themselves in a veritable procession of cars, vans, and irate cyclists. We were stuck, helpless, with nothing to do but look at the streams that were opening up and the way everyone in our route had to slow down and patiently, agonisingly, cross them.

The road cut into several lanes, all of them quite small but nevertheless resident to several houses, the occupants of which did not come out. No one would have of course, but then out of the blue I saw someone, umbrella in hand, walk towards us. The storm had calmed down a little, enough for me to discern that this was not an adult, but a schoolboy.

He would have been no more than 12 or 13. He had come out to look at the rain, and he was looking the drivers who were frustrated and the passengers who were bewildered if not irritated. The expression on his face, barely visible though it was, reminded me of the young prodigals from the stories of Saki: amused, excited, yet somehow contained. It’s the kind of sensibility we think children ought not to have, that operates on an inchoate mixture of happiness and indifference. And yet, it was exactly that sensibility which made me forget the rain, my driver, my fellow passengers, and reflect on the kind of movies our directors make for our children today. That schoolboy, incidentally, had by now disappeared, probably to his house. If he reads this essay, let it be known that he might as well have been its co-writer.

In most countries, there is a difference between movies for children and movies about children. In Sri Lanka the confusion between the two has been, for some reason, sustained so much that we can no longer differentiate between them. Nearly half the films we recall watching as children, which we thought were about them and, naturally, about us, weren’t; they were slick exercises in commercialism, because by inserting the kind of stories we like to listen to in them, the directors of those films were able to market them as family pictures. One such picture I saw had an altercation on a bridge between a monk and a “savage” (yes, you know what film I’m talking about here) that ends with the latter throwing his axe out of fear at the other. But this confusion or conflation between two paradigmatically different genres has served to intensity the debate over any picture with children in it. For the truth is that, unfortunately and in both genres, our directors have so far failed to identify the sensibilities and the emotions of their target market.

Our children are, according to these movies, rich, poor; spoilt, brash; naive, honest; fat, thin. They are conceived by our directors as the products and extrapolations of the tropes that operate in our popular cinema. In most cases the rich prodigal is terribly spoilt, so much that he can’t be salvaged: the film either tosses him aside or destroys him. And in three cases out of four or five the poor child will be honest-to-god sincere, naive, adaptable, and heroic. Producers prey on these dichotomies and tropes because they are what got them the rupees at the box-office when they were churning out movies for the masses, the adults. By condensing those tropes, by approximating them to our children, they are on their way to marketing bigger pictures, this time not for adults but for entire families. Let’s face it: who doesn’t like entertainment with kids thrown in, anyway?

The boy I saw that day inculcated the sort of sensibility those producers and their directors purposely leave out when they attempt family entertainment, the sort that displays a casual disregard for rich/poor dichotomies. Such dichotomies are hard to sustain, because while the rich are considered despicable and the poor virtuous it isn’t difficult to ascertain that the rich aren’t always that despicable and the poor aren’t always that virtuous. Privileged children suffer from onscreen apathy: they are forced by our scriptwriters to be sickly, weak, and spoilt, as Heena Hoyana Samanallu makes it obvious. To make these qualities more apparent to us, they are also forced to overact, to be unrealistically brittle when they are rich, endowed, and to be ungodly positive (exceeding even Pollyanna’s standards of optimism) when they are poor, destitute, when the truth may be different. Our children don’t flourish in want, nor do they suffer in wealth. It’s actually the other way around, though our directors don’t want to admit that.

If you survey most of the children’s pictures these directors have made, whether marketed for families or not, you will find the main quality that brings them together is their attitude of condescension towards their (ostensible) subject-matter. Everything is staccato, careful, slow, gradual, yet sloppily edited. The children in question are loud, jerkily depicted and conceived, and the director appears to be cautious or daunted about letting them breathe, or even letting them be themselves. Every burst of emotion that’s compelled from them is spelt out in clear, straightforward terms, perhaps because the cast and crew are afraid of relaxing what I frequently see as a perfectly constrained, and hence lifeless, movie. Somaratne Dissanayake’s early works don’t suffer from this limitation (especially Saroja) but his later works, particularly from Bindu onwards, do. They are less children, in fact, than messengers of their directors and scriptwriters and other adults. No one bothers about them; the truth is no one has to, because it’s a family picture, and these kids have become what the writers want them to be: loud, expressive, and virtually incapable of subtlety. They are anything but, especially in their adolescent years.

A film like Siri Raja Siri works in this sense because, while the script virtually oozes bursts of emotion (always calculated, never spontaneous) from its child actors, we don’t doubt for a moment that these are children: they are loud, but they are young enough to be as brash and naive as they are. It’s a different story with a film like Heena Hoyana Samanallu or Daruwane, which forcefully transposes the childhood “necessity” of being wide-eyed expressive about everything into their child actors, boys or girls.

There’s a sequence in Siri Raja Siri where our hero, Sirimal, and the bully almost get to be on speaking terms with each other in the classroom. We know by this time that Sirimal has been chosen to play the king in an upcoming school production and the antagonist is to play the prisoner (a stark reversal of fortune: the poor will now order the execution of the rich prodigal, onstage); we know the antagonist doesn’t like this; yet it seems almost as though he’s forgiven it all and moved on. But then, just as the director is about to force this unrealistic piece of feel-good kitsch on us, he doesn’t move ON, he moves AWAY: those friendly overtures by our bully are revealed as overtures to a tentative “deal” to steal Sirimal’s role for himself. Sirimal refuses, only to have our antagonist mock him and leave. The disjuncture in the mood during and after this encounter was, I think, one of the saving virtues of that film. (The other saving virtue was that hilarious moment where our hero, now forced to be the condemned villain, weeps so hysterically at his fate, and wins the Best Actor Award; this sequence, featuring cameos of the likes of Rohana Baddage, H. A. Perera, and Charitha Priyadarshani, had me laughing right until the end.)

Such flashes of reality, tempered down to suit our kids, win us when they are based on either confrontation or comedy, as Siri Raja Siri proves. They cannot be based on feel-good kitsch that directors throw at us in the name of morality and sincerity. But then this truism isn’t understood by everyone, not even by those who stick to it in their other work. Now I understood the rift between savagery and enlightenment in Sooriya Arana (also by Somaratne Dissanayake) and I even enjoyed it, but I could relate more to the sequences of freewheeling friendship between Sumedha (“Podi Hamuduruwo”) and Tikira than the incongruous altercations between them and their elders. Once you entrap your audience, most of whom happen to be kids, with this kind of incongruity, you bewilder them; it’s almost as though the song-and-dance sequences (“Iren Handen” was the best song I’d heard back then in a long, long time) were directed by one person, for the kids, while the sequences of the monk rebelling against the veddah and vice-versa were directed by another, for the adults. Which brings me to my earlier point: sugar-coated cheerfulness makes sense where family pictures are concerned, but so does violence, because the former appeals to youngsters, the latter to elders, and bringing both to the halls brings in more money to the producers.

It has been said of our society, and the popular culture our society inhabits, that our children want to be adults and our adults want to go back to their younger days. This isn’t true for our time only, because that dichotomy between childhood and adulthood has been there, always, and has been used creatively by filmmakers the world over. Chaplin resorted to it (in The Kid he’s as naive as the boy he adopts), and Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon, a touching part-tribute to Chaplin, resorted to it too, while in Sri Lanka we’ve had Mahendra Perera as a cheerful but stunted clown in Arumosam Wehi, one of the few movies about children made here I enjoyed sincerely until the end, and Isham Samsudeen and (on two occasions) Harith Baddewala and Harith Samarasinghe playing the role of schoolboys-turned-magicians-and-detectives in Ran Kevita and Ran Kevita 2, which borders on a silliness that could only have been conjured up to be convincing by Udayakantha Warnasuriya, who directed both. But I’m not talking about this sort of age reversal. It’s far more insidious: the truth of the matter is that we have forced our children to be the adults they are not, the end-result being that our directors can only portray them as idiotic, lanky, and unremarkable, to make them come to the theatres and see or project themselves as the children that they have been conditioned to not become.

Moviemakers and scriptwriters need to be endowed with a certain kind of intelligence when they try to depict children because children can’t be rationalised on their terms. In Mouse we come across an almost Dickensian hero in the form of its titular protagonist, whose ambition is to master the world of computers his background makes it impossible for him to get close to. In many respects the movie flounders wildly, but its greatest strength lies in its perceptive handling of the main character, despite the idiocy of nearly every adult in the story (case in point: the maid of his rich friend, who looks on angrily as he unloads his bladder on the carefully tended garden). But the hero of Mouse is more the exception than the rule, and in fact all too often comes from strained circumstances (as with Heena Hoyana Samanallu). The message we get here – that the rich are stupid and incapable, the poor noble and heroic – is unrealistic because it lacks the timbre of conviction such a dichotomy requires. Vittorio de Sica tried his hand at this dichotomy in film after film – the noble poor against the ignoble rich – until, in Miracle in Milan, he transposed it to children and lost his ground. (Its sentimental ending, where the poor fly up to heaven, was described aptly by de Sica himself as being “desperate.”)

It’s more fun and exhilarating to watch them think beyond their years but that’s only if the adults they are emulating think and behave intelligently, and intelligibly. In fact even the TV shows we saw back in our day, dubbed or otherwise – from Tintin to Pancha to Api Raja Ibbo to Naana Katha Malliya – were predicated on young heroes who used their wits in ways that couldn’t do justice to their youth. They were thinking ahead, and living ahead, and we revelled in being them. But that was the past. Today we have TV shows of poorly and sloppily animated characters, often between the ages of 10 and 15, who gain their personality not from their minds, but from their muscles. One of these cartoon shows, telecast here currently, has its protagonist rely on a type of food that teeters between samaposha and aggala. (The argument that Asterix and Obelisk relied on their arishta this way falls flat on the ground because they used their wits when they ran out of that arishta, which they often did.) What’s tragic about this is that such cartoon shows are miles away from the movies that kids targeted by them watch. The kids grow up on cartoons that promote idiocy and movies that promote heroism unhindered by moral scruples. The result is that they’re growing up, if not already grown up, before they hit 17, and become either cheerfully idealistic or insufferably arrogant. (Case in point: those elders they earlier referred to as sir or aiya, they now refer to by name. They have grown up to be more casual, in other words.)

These young adults, as I like to call them, are so indulged by their elders that when they grow beyond their age, and become optimistic and downright conceited, they are praised by those same elders. This contradictory culture of forcing them to be more than who they are while treating them as kids – one of the peculiarities of modern sensibility – is what finds its way to the films made about them or films which feature them, in this country. Like I wrote before, they are more often than not loud, staccato, an indication that the directors and writers of these movies feel that every gesture, every breath, by the child actors have to be delivered as over the top bursts of emotion. The difference between the protagonists of Saroja and the protagonists of Siri Parakum is not difficult to spot in this regard. In the former, our heroes and heroines are given some kind of outlet for them to think and act and behave on their own, and the adults are at least superficially independent and intelligent, if not flawed (the most powerful character in that film, I must note here, was not the teacher played by Janaka Kumbukage, but the doubtful, mildly racist, yet caring wife played by Nita Fernando); in the latter, though, the children are helpless until they are grown up: they have to fall, stumble, be corrected, carried away, and looked after all the time. Their only source of independence is their ability to talk loudly, which is why the line, “Mama raja kumarayek nemeyi, mama game kollek!” became so popular throughout the country: audiences haven’t come across this sort of naive confidence in a young actor before, and our children are, needless to say, thrilled.

I think we are missing the bus, or getting on the same bandwagon, or both. Back in the day children were intelligently conceived, depicted, and directed. Today we have run out of scriptwriters who can conceive them and directors who can push them properly. Consequently this trend of being overly expressive has turned them into idiots: they are unable to project their intentions without resorting to the loudspeaker. The past was a different world, a world in which even filmmakers like Chandran Rutnam (Janelaya), Sumitra Peries (Maya and Sagara Jalaya), and Lester James Peries (Rekava and Madol Duwa) could handle their child actors cohesively. They thought beyond their years at a time when in reality they were told not to. The irony, if you can see it by now, is that we have come to a point where they are encouraged to be the big men and women they are not, whereby they age so quickly that they are wont more to silence and introspection than to childishness (this can sometimes be a sign of their arrogance).

And yet, even with this, our directors have regressed. Perhaps they want to take us back to those dark times where we were compelled to be ourselves even though we dared to think beyond our years; they want to repress us, in other words. How do you repress children who want to be adults? By making them loud and idiotic, of course. If the recent past is anything to go by, therefore, our movies portray them as the purveyors of mindless noise and idiocy that they are anything but. A tragedy? I certainly think so.

Written for: Ceylon Today MOSAIC, November 19 and 26 2017