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Akkara Paha is, I think, one of the most underestimated great works of Sinhala cinema ever made, and it was made by Lester James Peries, who passed away last Sunday at the age of 99. Not many today have seen it, just as not many have seen Lester’s other great works, including the one that won him an entire nation after years of financial misfortune, Golu Hadawatha. The shift from his debut, Rekava, to these films did not mean that he gave up being what Philip Cooray called a lonely artist. He remained lonely, right till the end. But far from being a weakness, a defect, this remained his legacy, because in being lonely, he taught everyone, anyone, the power of the cinema in recording the lives we had led.
Lester James Peries was, until his last, a book waiting to be written, chapterised, and categorised in great detail. No one took the time. It’s not that no one wanted to, but that times had changed from those which he lived in and with changing times people were content in seeing what he had done and appreciating what he had filmed. All things considered, his movies remain a pretty good record of life as it was lived at a particular time, and even his historical romances, especially Sandeshaya, contain a tinge of authenticity in how their characters walk and talk.
His movies are great in this sense not just because of how they appeal to our worldview – through the techniques they thrive on, along with the motifs that crop up like from a symphony in all of them – but also because of how they capture the subtlest nuances, the gentlest moods and gestures, thereby capturing the dramatic in the un-dramatic. The sequence of Sugath coming across Dhammi at the carousel; the sequence of Sena coming across Theresa in her bedroom; the sequence of Willie Abeynayake dancing in an apotheosis of quiet, contained ecstasy with the woman he married to offer as a sacrifice: in these, the camera transcends its physical limits and records a mood, a gesture, a way of life that we can only hear through silence. It’s no coincidence that Golu Hadawatha and even Delovak Athara were movies which could have gone down the easy path of histrionics and hysterics. They needed Lester to be toned down.
It has been said of Cartier-Bresson that he took so many photographs because he loved human beings. If this is true, I think it can be applied to Lester too. Not because he was sentimental about the characters he shot and their real-life counterparts, but because he came from a tradition which eschewed the overtly political for the gently, suavely humanist. If by humanist you mean an artist who portrays the lives of ordinary people, caringly, then I see no problem in applying that term to Lester, who on countless occasions said, and noted, that he owed Jean Renoir and Vittorio de Sica for what he did in his field.
We can say that he was charitable, that he helped everyone who came to him, even when they forgot him. But we can also say that among those people, there was one who never left him or gave up on his efforts. That was his wife, Sumitra.
Like motifs from one long symphony, Lester’s films can be discussed separately or collectively. I remember Rajpal Abeynayake writing once that what makes his films stand out is the fact that they represent a body of work that is not diffuse, that is not disjointed, and that is instead well formed and cohesive. When Lester won a Lifetime Award at Cannes, and journalists and writers contended that the man had finally stepped away from the sidelines, Rajpal was not a little sceptical. “He may have been forgotten in Cannes,” he wrote, “But he is not forgotten in Sri Lanka” – in which, I think, we can sense a kind of irony, because, for many years, many of us subscribed to the notion that the world had revered the man, while we, his countrymen, had forgotten him. He WAS forgotten, of course: by the political pamphleteers, who lambasted him, and even by those who sought his advice, crossed terrains, made strides, and then cast him away because he and Sumitra were expendable to them. What was marginalised was the fact that Lester and Sumitra were the only professional purveyors of art cinema that we had. Yes, “art cinema” is hardly a term you use when discussing his works. Perhaps categorising the cinema he stood for is an exercise in futility.
He was a man who could make a film about a peasant and a walawu karaya on equal terms. Like the men he revered in his day, especially Renoir, whom he revered more than anyone else, he did not view human beings as set pieces and props to be labelled and turned into propaganda. That the lovers of Golu Hadawatha had the luxury of a comfortable, privileged life to return to, that the protagonist of Delovak Athara hailed from a bourgeois background in Colombo 7, could not have bothered discerning audiences who saw these films and felt and cared about the characters in them. When Pauline Kael wrote of Renoir’s Grand Illusion, that while its message was for universal brotherhood and compassion (Renoir was an avowed Socialist), it was also an elegy for the European aristocracy, she might have been describing Lester himself, who, like the Frenchman, elegised and eulogised the aristocracy in film after film. No other moviemaker here has been as able to turn the rich and the privileged into figures of empathy; that says a lot about where he came from, and where we come from.
So yes, we knew this day would come. But for the life of me, we didn’t want it. Frankly, I know I didn’t. But it had to come. Which is what makes the pain of knowing that the man is no more, that he is gone, all the more painfully evident.
Written for: Daily Mirror, May 1 2018
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