I can never forget the moment I first saw him. Tissa Abeysekara, recounting in an essay the first time he met Lester in his Dehiwela residence, tells us that he was reminded of a Bourbon prince. There were obviously many princes hailing from the House of Bourbon, but I think that in that remark, Tissa was suggesting that Lester embodied a somewhat contradictory character: hardly imposing, rather thin, and quite small, and at odds with his at times larger-than-life stature which still had room for that rarest of human qualities we refer to as humility. I didn’t know how to approach such a man. How does a pauper approach a prince, anyway? But he beckoned to me, smiling rather noticeably, and I took that as a cue. What I expected was a conversation, one spanning more than two hours.
That was not to be. There were relatives visiting and Lester, who was somewhat tired at the prospect of having long lost friends and acquaintances paying him social calls when they were in their land of birth, was sad to see me go. But I had to go. I promised I would return in one week, and that I’d call Sumitra, who was still in bed at that hour. (It was later that I realised that they had their lunch at two, and that they, especially Sumitra, would retire to an afternoon nap until about five.) Lester smiled. I smiled back and left.
I returned two weeks later, having made that call. He could spare some time for me now. So we sat in the sitting room, that small yet magnificently laid out room which contained Ivan Peries’s paintings, along with the works of other ’43 Group artists, and we talked. For two hours. What did we talk about? This, that, and everything else related to the cinema: from Orson Welles to Lenin Moraes. There were things we talked about that I hadn’t even heard of before. Like when Orson Welles came to Sri Lanka and he almost met him just as Welles was disembarking from his ship. Or when he met Leonard Woolf in London when he was working for the Times of Ceylon as a journalist. Or when he devoured the writings of his favourite critic, Edmund Wilson, so much that he’d cycle off to the Public Library every other day. Almost every award he won at his school had been for essay competitions; Lester’s first ambition had been to become a writer, but when he presented his first collection, Cathedral and a Star, to the great Jawarhalal Nehru, the look that he had given him, Lester told me, spoke for itself: “It was an acute though subtle mixture of admiration and pity. That book obviously didn’t grow out of an experience.”
Lester James Peries could have had all the reasons in the world to pack his bags and leave Sri Lanka, like those long lost friends and acquaintances who felt it their duty to visit their land of birth from time to time. He didn’t do that. Neither did Sumitra. I remember Professor Carlo Fonseka writing somewhere, on Lester of course, that one needn’t be well versed in the mother tongue to learn to love the country one grew up in. Speaking for myself, I think the Professor was correct. Regardless of the many criticisms which were hurled against him over the years, including those which alleged that he hadn’t depicted the Sinhala Buddhist milieu he opted to go for, properly, and also including those which alleged that he strengthened the hegemonies of that Sinhala Buddhist milieu, I fervently believe that Lester James Peries was the last proof we had that artists back then didn’t work for petty agendas, that they preferred to work with human beings rather than symbols. Hilaire Belloc wrote somewhere that the great Greek epic poets like Homer worked in stone, preferring to portray their heroes as types rather than the individuals they had been. The same could have been said of those who had a bone to pick with Lester for not questioning the structures and corridors of power his characters revolved around, suffered, or in some roundelay way legitimised.
He lived to be 99. He was 94 when I met him. That means I knew him for a little more or less than 5 years. 5 years out of a total of 99 or, if we are to account for his post-Rekava life, 62. Given this limitation, I can’t write or speak about Lester prodigiously. I know of his films, have seen them, and have been moved to anger and love by them. The best that I can hope for is an obituary – the tear-inducing, mushy-mushy type – but I am sorry to say that I’m not an obituarist. The most I can do, then, is pick, choose, and recount.
His films are about human beings. (Aren’t all films about human beings?) Like the movies of his spiritual counterpart, Satyajit Ray, who was born on the same day that Lester was cremated (May 2), the individuals in his universe are all redeemable, and when they aren’t, they are either cast out (in which case we forget about them, as we do with Cyril from Ran Salu) or annihilated (in which case they meet fearful ends, like Babehami and Fernando from Baddegama). But Lester was more nuanced, and I think more loyal to the necessity of freeing his universe from the shackles of idealism and optimism, than Ray was, a point he once noted when he contended that Ray’s world was inhabited by so much optimism that it was difficult to conceive of the sort of villains and antagonists and unredeemable individuals that his own world contained. What worked for Ray, in other words, couldn’t have worked for Lester, and as all his 20 films proved, what worked for him won many of his audiences, even those who initially despised him, over eventually. They wouldn’t have liked everything he did – and when he did away with bad characters altogether, as with Golu Hadawatha and Madol Doowa, he struck gold at the box office – but they somehow, over the years, appreciated the efforts he was making.
Lester remains the only director from our country who courted contradictory responses, some positive, many negative, from almost every corner of the critical fraternity. When Nalin de Silva wrote right after the man’s funeral that Lester was one of the artists, from the 1956 cultural renaissance, who displaced our collective effort to bring tradition and modernity together, in favour of a modernity informed by Western paradigms (political or cultural), he was obviously at the other end of Suren Raghavan, who posted on Facebook that Lester reinforced the Sinhala Buddhist hegemony which the likes of de Silva argued he was far, far away from. This was the kind of criticism that Lester endured all his life, and career: self-contradictory, filled with overwhelming censure, sometimes based on the same criterion of value.
Those who thought they knew more about the movies than the person making them, naturally, found some fault or the other in his works. Some thought Delovak Athara lacked a plot. Some thought Ran Salu was too plotted. Some thought Akkara Paha was propagandist, tilted in favour of Dudley Senanayake’s land ownership program. Some bit away at and virulently attacked Lester’s only attempt at a film depicting the decaying rural peasantry, Baddegama, because it was apparently too far away from the film. For them, with regard to the latter film, neither the actors nor the dialogues contained any conviction. The critics would have been satisfied, Lester told me, if the story was closer to, and was an actual reflection of, Leonard Woolf’s novel. In that sense, the man was attacked by both the wielders of the pen and purveyors of the cinema. The latter thought he wasn’t political or socially aware enough; the former believed that he was castrating important works of (Sinhala) fiction. No wonder those critics perpetuated the myth, largely discredited since, that Martin Wickramasinghe was angry with him for his adaptation of Gamperaliya.
At the end of the day, when we’ve forgotten the politics (of expedience and necessity) that goes into the making of a film, or work of art, particularly when that film is based on another work of art, we’ll learn to be simpler in the way we handle movies and the people who make them. A young man I know, well read, and never bothered with this sort of politics, or the critics who wax eloquent over them, once told me that there was much in Baddegama, and Gamperaliya, which endear themselves to even popular audiences.
Critics found fault with Lester for casting Vijaya Kumaratunga as Babun in the former; but really (this young man went on) when you think about it, even considering that Vijaya hadn’t (as Tony Ranasinghe, who played Fernando, told me) even touched and handled a spade before, his performance (particularly towards the end, in the courtroom sequence when he is found guilty) resembled his characterisation in the novel, in a convincing way. The same could have been said of the other actors that Lester picked and chose; ordinarily, the director plays second fiddle to actors the more popular the latter are, but with Lester, it was the other way around: for those actors, no matter how popular they were or would become, he was their guiding star, and even when they were miscast, they gave the best they could. Only the innocent, who see beyond the mythic garbs of the emperor, could see how and why Lester’s films worked so well.
This was the Lester James Peries I knew. There were other Lesters and people who saw those other Lesters. Now’s not the time to talk to them. I leave that for later. Much later.
Written for: Ceylon Today ECHO, May 13 2018
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