There are two versions of Golu Hadawatha that I have seen until now. The first, broadcast on television, ends with Sugath returning to his sister-in-law, Champa, after reaching a reconciliation of sorts with his lover-turned-tormentor, Dhammi. This final sequence, which brings about a happy ending for Sugath, was to me contrived, and for good reasons it was scrapped from the version which went to film festivals abroad and which I saw several months ago, at the National Film Corporation, as part of a series of screenings organised by the Premasiri Khemadasa Foundation. This version ends in the sequence right before Sugath re-enters his house and meets Champa; right where Dhammi, having recounted her part of the story (to us, not to Sugath), wipes away her tears and says, simply, “I am doomed to keep this story from you.” Bittersweet, almost elegiac, this is the ending most audiences would have taken to, the sort that best sums up the kind of lives we lead and the emotions and gestures, never loudly projected, we put out.
Golu Hadawatha was directed, of course, by Lester James Peries, and it was his sixth film; I am inclined to think that it was one of his best, better in many respects even to the acknowledged masterpiece, Nidhanaya, simply because unlike that other film, this one flows along so gracefully that it doesn’t betray any sign of being carefully, almost mechanically thought out. Nidhanaya is a virtuoso work in terms of technique: the lighting, the camerawork, the fidelity to its milieu, the performances, and the music and the editing. But take that technique away, and you are left with the most un-typical film Lester ever made: one in which humanism isn’t just repudiated, but downright repressed and rejected. In Golu Hadawatha the techniques cohabit with an exuberant, humanist tone, while the performances grow out of those techniques, and aren’t contained within. Because Nidhanaya needed to be the opposite of all that perhaps, it’s constricting, in a way that Western audiences would have reacted to positively. Western critics, particularly continental critics, are awed more by technique than by what actually goes on in a work of art; that has been their biggest failing.
Lester made 20 films over 50 years; this means he made a film every two years. On average, he took about six or eight months to complete shooting; this means that for more than a year, he was idle, doing nothing, visiting officials, trying to get the funds needed for his next project. If you read Kumar de Silva’s Lester by Lester, you’ll realise that the one thing which crops up like a motif in the man’s career is the fact that producers weren’t easy to find, and even when they were found, they cashed in on the man’s talent and abandoned him later on. (Ceylon Theatres, to their credit, stayed with him for three movies, all three of which are, I believe, the greatest he ever made.) This isn’t something only Lester or for that matter Sri Lankan moviemakers faced; after all even Robert Bresson made the same number of films over the same period. But comparisons to Bresson fade away when considering that he came from the country of Renoir, Godard, and Andre Malraux, the latter of whom oversaw the most ambitious subsidy scheme to finance the works of independent auteurs like (who else?) Bresson. In Sri Lanka, on the other hand, we are content in letting talent and craftsmanship go to waste, until – wait for it – the purveyors of that talent pass away. Lester was all of 99 when he left us last week: one more year, and he would have turned 100. There was no one to write on him properly when he was alive. Now there are.
For instance, someone called Suren Raghavan (a critic and an academic) posted the following indictment on Facebook, just hours after the man passed away:
Many Sinhala journalists have praised and even said that the late Dr Lester James Peries [is] the greatest cinema maker in Sri Lanka, and surely one of the best in the world... I stand to disagree with those claims. Lester was a great cine narrator no doubt. Yet his cinema use was essentially an urban middle class anxiety that soothed the postcolonial Sinhala nationalist insecurity. Like Pundit Amaradeva, Lester never could be considered as a transformative social artist who provided a trajectory for a deconstructive social mobility. But [he] rather reconfirmed the hegemony of the state-centric (in fact Sinhala urban) ideology in almost all his work. My complaint is not because he made something like Rekava but [because] he refused to move from that neo-colonial “Sarala Rekava.”
Take away the sour grapes, the feeling of outrage, and you will realise that beneath the vitriol, beneath the seething anger, is a sincere comment on Lester, his movies, and what they stood for. One could term this the limits of realism, the same realism that was casually attacked as “bourgeois” by the auteurs who forged a new cinematic stream in the seventies (prime among them, Dharmasena Pathiraja). When Mr Raghavan says that Lester was not a transformative social artist, he is contending that the man could not use the art form he opted for – and the movies, let’s not forget, have always been the most emotionally and socially powerful of all the arts of the 20th century – to critique various societal structures of power, and instead ended up depicting, in a way “reconfirming”, the Sinhala Buddhist “hegemony” of the State, in the guise of realism and humanism. And as if this wasn’t bad enough, this hegemony was rooted in the Sinhala urban milieu, the milieu which came up most potently in Delovak Athara and Ran Salu.
Here’s the problem with the generation that oversaw 1956: with some exceptions, the artists among them were unable to transcend the limits of their backgrounds. When Mr Raghavan (who is involved, tellingly, with the Colombo School for Critical Studies) ranks Amaradeva with Lester, despite their differences, he is not suggesting that they weren’t great artists (“Lester was a great cinematic narrator, no doubt,” he informs us), but that the art they churned out just wasn’t enough to emancipate the Other: in other words, that they had to fall back on the same hegemonic, petty bourgeois, Sinhala Buddhist milieu which in turn empowered the State to maintain their hegemony over the Other. To a certain extent, I’d agree, especially when considering the films that depict this specific milieu.
But then human beings are not monoliths and neither, one must admit, are artists. To blame Lester James Peries for the films he made is to ignore the crew and the cast who had a say in shaping those aforementioned hegemonies that are supposedly evident in his work. Ran Salu, for instance, cannot be considered as Lester through and through, because all he did was shoot the script as it was; the script, written by P. K. D. Seneviratne, was not altered, as it was with nearly all his other films. To blame Lester is also to ignore the rich, open canvas that he worked on, and to forget that you can be a humanist even when you are depicting the members of the same milieu who have done everything in their power to maintain their stronghold over the State at the cost of other identities. The fact that Lester, a Catholic, never came up with a story about Catholics is, I believe, proof that he transcended the limits of his identity. He was an outsider looking in, and he did a better job at looking at us than most of our nationalists.
The ardent artist isn’t obliged to serve the answers to every question revolving around his work on a silver platter (and this isn’t me saying it: Engels said it centuries ago). That’s the job of the critic, and Mr Raghavan, if we are to take his word for it, has done his part. Because words are needed, to praise and censure, we need to assess Lester James Peries by resorting to words. This does not mean that every tribute to every artist who passes away needs to be punctured with a sense of hysterical adulation. Such a thing is at best unconstructive and at worst propagandist when it comes to understanding the true intentions, and objectives, and outcomes, of the artist in question. Lester himself, who is probably the only filmmaker to raise flak from every quarter in the critical fraternity – the Marxists, the feminists, and the anti-hegemonists (like Mr Raghavan) – would have agreed completely. And in agreeing with that line of thinking, he’d have gotten us to agree with him, Mr Raghavan, and everyone else judging his body of work.
There are obvious reasons why Lester never went beyond the canvas he worked in and this is not the time to look into all of them. What is needed for such an enterprise is cool reticence. Something that we will not get now, with all the hoopla that is being bandied about, even by those who never cared for what he did when he was alive. In that sense, I think we ought to look more carefully at what Mr Raghavan has noted, because what he has said has more or less been echoed by other writers. Even Asoka Handagama, who was supported in his early endeavours by Lester and his wife, Sumitra, has passed judgment, often harshly, on this aspect of Lester’s work. The heroes we grew up with and on are a little like that, after all: once we realise that beneath the dazzling mastery of their accomplishments is a set of flaws that have never really been unearthed, we become turncoats and unearth them. It’s the same thing with directors and actors and scriptwriters: once you spot them out, you call them out. Simple as that.
Written for: Ceylon Today ECHO, May 6 2018
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