One year later... what?

Warren Beatty’s extraordinary film Reds charts the life and career of John Reed, who became the first American to be buried in the Kremlin for his sympathy and support for the Bolsheviks. The movie is extraordinary not so much for its vast, epic canvas as for its depiction of the protagonist’s trysts with idealism and disillusionment.

There’s an interesting scene towards the end of the film. Reed (played by Beatty) is on a train with his “Comrades”. They’re returning from the the Congress of the Peoples of the East held at Baku, Azerbaijan, where he had been amazed at Muslims chanting “Jihad!” as his inaugural speech was being translated. In the train Reed realises the reason: his speech was rewritten, not translated, and in place of “class war”, which was what the Revolution was SUPPOSED to be about, the translator had substituted “Holy War”. He then angrily confronts Grigory Zinoniev, the man who sanctioned the translation.

What unfolds thereafter is a classic argument on the (de)merits of revolution and truth, underscored by Reed’s growing disenchantment with the Bolsheviks. To quote: “When you separate a man from what he loves the most, what you do is purge what’s unique, and when you purge what’s unique in him, you purge dissent. And when you purge dissent, you kill the Revolution.” Which leads to possibly the biggest “truism” nearly every revolution in human history has venerated: “Revolution is Dissent!”

There’s a catch here, of course. Reed probably never had this confrontation. He probably never argued with Comrade Zinoniev the way the film makes us believe he did. It was Beatty who scripted that sequence.

Poetic license notwithstanding however, Beatty’s Reed was spot on there. Revolutions are birthed by idealists. But can these idealists go on without the need to accommodate dissent, without realising that truth can only lead to reconciliation and that the gains of a revolution can only be solidified if (and ONLY if) that reconciliation isn’t fudged or frilled? To be more concise: if revolutionists grow complacent with time, doesn’t that take back the gains of their revolution?

One year ago (we’re told), there was a revolution in Sri Lanka. Commentators today never seem to grow tired of chirping on and on about the overthrow of tyranny that this led to, and about how the world (no less!) can take a leaf out of our book with regard to restoring democracy. I know for a fact that these commentators genuinely believe what they’re harping about: that after more than 10 years of a despotic tyranny, “overthrow” was definitely not that easy to achieve.

Not easy to achieve perhaps, but not impossible either. Those who laud the people for having overthrowing Mahinda Rajapaksa’s regime, not surprisingly, are silent over how the people went to the ballot and threw other complacent leaders out in the past.

That is a silent if not forgivable omission on their part, though. What I find unforgivable and laughable, however, is their assessment of the situation AFTER the revolution. Put pithily, there’s discontentment. There’s also happiness. For the most however, there are mixed feelings. And there’s hypocrisy.

Let me come out with it: none of us was happy with the way Mahinda Rajapaksa handled the country. After he passed the 18th Amendment, he embraced a new self, a no-no as far as amity and peace for the country were concerned. He sanctioned acts of theft, violence, quackery, and chicanery on the part of those who, at the last moment, disowned him and “became” lily-white angels. Most horrendously though, he implied that he himself realised this. No other president in this country, after all, has on the verge of an election claimed that the “known devil” is better than the “unknown”.

In comparison, Maithripala Sirisena is way ahead. No other president had the guts to clip his own powers. No other president tried so hard to be simple in behaviour and appearance. I attended functions where he spoke at length, not about his political career but about his personal life. I saw and heard him speak about his schooldays when I attended the 150th Anniversary Day of St Benedict’s College, Kotahena, where he was Chief Guest. His reminiscences, at once poetic and free of frill, moved me.

And I know he’s still trying. There were those who lambast(ed) him over the Budget, his conduct at the UN General Assembly, and his reaction to that disastrous Enrique Iglesias concert. But look closer: he may have committed the gaffe, but it’s someone else who has to take the blame for that gaffe. He is not Mahinda Rajapaksa, at least not to an extent, in this regard.

Yes, we are grateful.

But not being like Mahinda Rajapaksa will neither salvage nor sustain the revolution. The president has been quick to affirm, deny, or apologise, but he has also been quick to trip himself up. He has contradicted himself on various policy issues (most notably his stance on the death penalty, denied by his own Foreign Minister overseas). His stand on nepotism has raised eyebrows. His affirmation of a multiethnic and rational society, where primitivism doesn’t hold sway, has fallen flat on the ground when confronted with the way he lambasted the organisers of the Iglesias concert (and that on the pretext of protecting our Sinhala Buddhist culture!).

There’s more.

A friend of mine once gave his take on revolutions of the sort our president authored: “They are fine for rhetoric. They are fine for those insured against transition. But for those who lose from them, not because they backed the ‘other side’ but because that transition leads to economic instability, the government remains hard to support, harder to sustain.” I think he was being a tad too unfair on the government, but I see his point: at a time when the world’s turbulent enough, revolutions of THIS sort, coupled especially with the sort of policy U-Turns we’ve been seeing soon after the president took oaths last year, need to be handled well.

This government hasn’t handled it well, truth be told. I’ve lost faith in the rupee. I don’t bother keeping a tab on prices. I can’t think of a worse time to save or invest or borrow (except during the war years). I don’t remember whether we even had a Budget last year, given the number of capitulations the Finance Ministry has done with respect to that. And no, I can’t understand why we STILL haven’t apprehended the likes of (Dr) Mervyn Silva (where is he now, I wonder?).

As if this wasn’t bad enough, I have another complaint: I don’t know why the president had to slap democracy in the face and appoint rejects as Ministers last August.

Oh no, I’m not saying we need to go back to the Rajapaksa Regime. But that doesn’t mean those who won on account of their allegiance with the former president should be “punished” by being relegated to the parliament. I remember what another friend of mine said: “We can’t afford five-star democracy when it comes to Mahinda Rajapaksa”. A poor justification of what transpired in August 2015, I believe.

For those still trying to justify what Sirisena did, hence, I have one thing to say: just stop it. Democracy isn’t five-star, it’s unqualifiable. Purely and simply.

And so one year has gone by. Losers are occupying Ministries and they run the show. Some even seem to be behaving as though what they’re doing was and is accepted by the same people who reject them. Crass. Pathetic. Typical.

No wonder we have a de facto “Join Opposition” in addition to (and apart from) the TNA-JVP de jure Opposition! No wonder that Joint Opposition can still play on fears perceived and imagined, for the most revolving around issues of sovereignty, suzerainty, and political quackery. No wonder, also, that racist rhetoric is on the rise, what with a segment of the population virtually unrepresented thanks to a government that refuses to recognise their grievances and demands!

Enough to make you a cynic, right?

When I reflect on all this, I can only grin at the Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and Wordpress activists who ranted against Mahinda Rajapaksa, who’re now bending over backward to defend the man they elected to power, even in the most ludicrous situation. I can only guffaw at their pathetic attempts at criticising the president’s statements while defending the president himself. And I can only scowl and glare at their EVEN more pathetic attempts at trying to place abuses and misuses of power by this government in a better light than those of the Rajapaksa Regime, and that by using the “relative merits” argument.

No, quackery isn’t relative, folks. Especially when it’s political. I think that’s the biggest lesson we’ve learnt this past year.

And I think we’re done listening to these activists and bloggers trying to tell us otherwise.

PS: In the version of this article I wrote for the Colombo Telegraph, I referred to the "Baku Congress" as the "Fourth Comintern Congress". That was a mistake. An erroneous one. I apologise.

Uditha Devapriya is a freelance writer who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com

Thank you, Mr Premaratne

Recently I was perusing lists compiled by acquaintances of the best Sri Lankan films from the past 50 years. I noticed names which had been skewed. Sure, there were the usual titles. But overall, films which deserved slots in the lists were absented for inexplicable reasons. 

Perhaps there were biases against "indigenous" titles which hadn't had a presence outside Sri Lanka, but to me this was stupid. Cinema is cinema. Why should it matter whether a film won here or abroad? If critics and audiences took to it, the list should have a place for it. Purely and simply.

I know for a fact that people still speak warmly about H. D. Premaratne and his films. Who wouldn't? I also know for a fact that some of the titles which still make it into these lists are loved and "loved", which is to say they contain sentimental value. Now here's my question: why should we be fixated on award-clinchers? Why shouldn't we account for the audience, those who genuinely feel for and take to a work of art while being aware that concessions to the box-office can’t come at the cost of critical appeal?

I mentioned H. D. Premaratne. Last December it’d been 10 years since he passed away. There'll be tributes and assessments made of the man and his work. Directors are judged by their final product though, a bane but at the same time an inevitability in an industry where a hundred or so successes can be hampered by one failure. This is as true now as it was then, as true for Premaratne as it was (and is) for other directors. Followers of cinema here however will only have one thing to say about this remarkable man:

"Thank you, Mr Premaratne."

His films won awards, but that's not what they are chiefly remembered for. At the time he began making movies, the Sinhala cinema was split along commercial lines. Some films made money. They came and were forgotten in a few years. Others won awards. They bombed at the box-office.

Premaratne's greatest triumph, for which we are grateful, was proving that you could make profit and keep the critics happy. In this he was ahead of most contemporaries. He was, until his death, a first among equals.

I remember reading about Sucharitha Gamlath's take on Premaratne's Palama Yata. He wasn't fond of it, regardless of the fact that it had won praise from his contemporaries. For Gamlath, Palama Yata robbed the audience while pleasing their eyes. A crude simplification of a film at that, but that was Gamlath.

Gamlath may not have been thinking of all of Premaratne's films until that point, but my hunch is that there were critics who considered it fashionable to find in them everything that was wrong with conventional cinema: profit-oriented and very rarely (if at all) socially conscious. I am however yet to come up with a director who examined class, caste, gender, sexuality, and every other perennial theme stemming from the human condition as evocatively as he did.

I'm thinking of Deveni Gamana here, with its unconventional treatment of virginity in a way which endeared it to both critic and audience. I am also thinking of Visidela, Adara Hasuna, Palama Yata, even Sikuruliya. He inserted frill into them, yes. But that had less to do with shying away from encountering the themes they touched on than a duty he felt towards the producer. Premaratne's son Ranga once confirmed this to me: he made it a point to make money for whoever produced his films.

There are sequences in these films which escape the eye at first but which come back, again and again, in ways which make a crass reading of them an injustice. I'm thinking of the sequence of Swineetha Weerasinghe's character coming across the dwarfish aristocrat in Sikuruliya, by a small river and with him on a donkey. The encounter between heroine and antagonist (yes, those terms do indicate his films had good and bad guys) seems almost as though from a John Ford film, with its panoramic setting and that folksy, yet indefinable, ambiance.

I'm also thinking of the sequence of cross-dressers dancing to that M. S. Fernando classic, "Dili Dili Dilisena Eliyak", from the same film. Such scenes aren't hard to find, even in his other work. They are witness to how well crafted his films were, and bear testament to Premaratne’s craftsmanship, when camerawork, music, lighting, decor, and pretty much every other element comes up to demarcate "pure cinema". They could not have been conceived in any other way, not in any other medium, and certainly not in the commercial cinema. There had to be intelligence. Of a rare sort.

Premaratne had that intelligence. His work bears this out, of this I am certain.

His sympathy for his female characters was evident from the word go, moreover. My friend Chris Dilhan Nonis summed this up for me the other day: "He was spot on with his portrayal of and empathy for women, for the most from a certain social class." Even in Deveni Gamana, where the heroine is relatively affluent, that empathy was unqualified.

I remember Swineetha Weerasinghe pointing this to me with how she had to portray the protagonist in Sikuruliya: as a woman who changes from an innocent village girl to a hardy urban woman, a transformation which required her to portray not one but three different women bearing the same basic identity. To give effect to that transformation would have required skilful direction, which is what Premaratne gave us in his debut. What was more laudable was his attitude to Swineetha's character: he never absolves her, but with the trials and tribulations she has to undergo he never condemns her either.

That was Premaratne. At his best. Unparalleled.

Malinda Seneviratne wrote on his last film, Kinihiriya Mal. "A cast with exceptional skills, good selection of location, and reasonably good cameramanship does not necessarily coalesce into a good film" was his comment. True. Perhaps Premaratne tried to veer away from his usual canvas, to engage with contemporary themes and earn the "socially committed" tag.

But by attempting to do that while keeping to the simplifications which made up the bulk of his other work, he failed. Seneviratne summed this up best: "The urban-rural dichotomy depicted in the film is contrived and unconvincing for such clear demarcations are no longer tenable, not even in the imagination of the romantic ruralised." Kinihiriya Mal wasn't lambasted all the way, granted. But it wasn't the ambitious success Premaratne cut it out to become.

That's all done and dusted though. The man was likable because his films won heart and mind. Few directors today, with their ambitious attempts at besting one other in terms of critical appeal, can emulate what Premaratne left us with: works of art which aimed at the populist and the socially conscious in us. We can all take a leaf out of his book, I believe.

Here’s what we can say, hence.

Thank you, Mr Premaratne. For now and forever.

Photo courtesy of Ranga Premaratne

Written for: The Island LIFESTYLE, January 3 2016

Lester James Peries: Conversations with an Icon

There are people who merit introductions and people who don’t. I’m not sure which of these two categories I should put this week’s star under. Lester James Peries, after all, is a book that has been written, revised, edited, and even frilled, by those who claim to present a faithful account of the man and his career.

Let me put it this way then: his is a story which has seen countless days, nights, months, years, and decades. To do justice to them all, therefore, is most certainly beyond my task. There comes a time when so much ink is wasted on inessential details, that to get to the essence of any man becomes difficult. Peries is our foremost filmmaker. He is a “father” to many, young and old. Maybe that’s the best way I can introduce him for you.

Lester was (as everyone knows) born on April 5, 1919. His father, James Peries, had been a doctor and a madcap over cricket. His mother, Grace Jayasuriya, had been the first in her school to pass the Cambridge Senior Examination. While Doctor Peries had been educated at Royal College, he sent his son to St. Peter’s College, nearer to their ancestral home in Dehiwela.

He had been the eldest son in his family, with two younger brothers and one elder sister. But while his father had instinctively taken to medicine, both Lester and his brother Ivan had taken to art. I ask him whether this was reinforced while at school, and he tells me that while St. Peter’s did encourage a robust art culture, he didn’t really get to express his artistic temperament in it. He did, however, win several prizes at essay competitions.

Lester remembers many things. His memory is phenomenal, which may account for his philosophical attitude. He reflects on his school days with quiet nostalgia. Nearly everyone who has read up on him would, of course, remember an argument he once had with Father Peter Pillai, the legendary priest who had also taught at St. Joseph’s. Apparently Father Pillai had wanted him to follow his path. “He tried to make me take to the priesthood,” Lester chuckles, “I said I wanted to be a writer or journalist. He pooh-poohed the idea.”

I ask him whether the Catholic ethos instilled by his school influenced him in any way as he went on with his career. He says he doesn’t think so. “I wasn’t rooted in my culture,” he tells me a little ruefully, “Even today, I can’t speak Sinhala properly. We were actively forbidden to look into or be interested in other cultures. Going to a Buddhist funeral was out of the question. You had to pay penance if you did such a thing.

“The other problem was that we were anglicised. The Church, having distanced us from our roots, inadvertently sped up a process of westernisation. Some of us became snobs. Others, like Ivan and me, began looking at ways to reclaim our lost roots.” Having a language deficiency wouldn’t have helped them here, which is probably why they fell back on a purely visual medium.

Lester’s first ambition, as I mentioned above, was to become a writer or journalist. He met Lionel Wendt while writing for his Matriculation exam, and at once came under his influence. “Wendt was publishing a fortnightly paper called Kesari. He encouraged me to write for it, which I did. This intensified my resolve to become a writer on my own.”

I ask him what authors he took to, and with a chuckle he says there were so many of them. “Ernest Hemingway was my idol,” he tells me, “I admire him for the way he wrote: his austere, to the point style. That was what I aimed at.” He also remembers Proust: “I bought every volume of his ‘Remembrance of Things Past’. My God, what a bunch they were!”

In the meantime, he got a job writing for the Times of Ceylon as well, being hired in 1939. Two years later, Orson Welles would release Citizen Kane. I ask him whether this film had any impact on him, and he at once agrees. “Orson Welles was my hero,” he remembers, “I was simply awed by Kane. The techniques it innovated, especially deep focus cinematography, have stayed with us ever since. Sometime later, when I had become a director, I toyed with the idea of making a Citizen Kane based on our own press baron, D. R. Wijewardena.”

Needless to say, it became an unrealised project. I wonder, however, whether such a venture would have merely been an “adaptation” of a foreign film. The story of Charles Foster Kane, after all, bears some affinity to that of Wijewardena.

This isn’t the only way one can compare Lester with Welles, of course. There is another comparison that can be made. It surfaces clearly in the sequences in their films which feature heated arguments. The final encounter between mother and son in Delovak Athara; the exchanges between the religiously-inclined daughter and her conservative-urban parents in Ran Salu; and the feud between the protagonist and his sister in Nidhanaya – in these instances, the camera become a dexterous participant in the argument, emphasizing the characters’ own insecurities. There is that same sense of dexterousness in many of Welles’ own argument scenes as well, notably in The Magnificent Ambersons, which briefly touch on comedy and then suddenly culminate on a touching, unresolved note. Welles’ influence on Lester, therefore, is not that easy to miss.

Lester then left to England in the war years, acting as the Times London correspondent. He saw quite a number of plays and films during this time, especially the more continental ones. There was one incident which he remembers in particular, however. “It was almost a call to home,” he says quietly, suppressing emotion, “That was a concert with Herbert Rajapaksa. He sang a song which stayed and has stayed with me ever since.”

This was Sunil Shantha’s “Olu Pipeela”. It had strung Lester’s heart, and soon enough, he was on his way home. “I heeded the call to home. I knew that I would be earning much less than what I was in London. But back then, being the idealist I was, I didn’t give a tinker’s damn!”

Back in Sri Lanka, he joined the Government Film Unit, where he met two of his most frequent collaborators in the years to come, Titus Thotawatte and Willie Blake. Together, they made some acclaim-worthy documentaries and short films. But the stability of a government job wasn’t enough for these three, and soon they got an offer they just couldn’t refuse. “My cousin, Christopher Peries, wanted to make a feature film with us. I knew I couldn’t pass up on this, because part of my wanting to come back to Sri Lanka was to strike my own path as a filmmaker. Both Willie and Titus encouraged me to take the offer, which I did.” His parents and his superior at the Government Film Unit firmly opposed the idea, but in the end, both parties relented.

Perhaps it was a legacy of his tryst with literature, but Lester admits that he was always more comfortable with fiction than with historical recreation. Maybe this is why some of the authenticity in his fictional films far surpasses his historical epics in terms of honesty of treatment, but the point is that he wanted a “story” in his first film. “Sarath Wijesinghe was to be our Chairman in the ‘Company’ we had set up to make films.” Wijesinghe was a firm supporter of the Bandaranaikes though, and soon after their debut he left the group, Chitra Lanka, and dissolved it to join politics. “That’s the thing with our film industry,” he informs me rather sadly, “You have producers coming up to you with offers, making films, and then leaving you.”

Lester has always been a maker of films about human beings. This has been the case from his debut, Rekava, onwards. I put it to him that this meant that when a “committed” cinema emerged here in the 1970s, he would have been pilloried by those who disliked his type of stories.

He chuckles at this, and admits that he was considered a “roadblock” by some of those directors. “They work with symbols,” he confesses, “I work with human beings.” This reminds me of a quote by Hillaire Belloc: “They work in stone”. The reference was to Greek epic poets. Perhaps a comparison can be struck between them and the “socially engaged” propagandists who emerged here in the 1970s. No doubt Lester has made the human condition part and parcel of his films, just as nearly every filmmaker he admires, from Robert Flaherty to Pedro Almodóvar, has.

I tell him here that while he considers himself “uprooted” owing to an anglicised childhood, his films have been incomparably faithful to Sri Lankan life. He replies to this by saying that he tried to be faithful to every nuance of Sri Lankan life. “This was especially true in Ran Salu. P. K. D. Seneviratne scripted the film. I told him just how much I trusted him over the way Buddhism was depicted. His was the only script which I didn’t change to my liking.”

Everybody has his favourite film by a director. When it comes to Lester James Peries, mine would have to be Delovak Athara. Perhaps this is owing to the compressed narrative structure in that film. “We consciously went for the New Wave when we made it,” he explains, “The entire story revolves around one incident and one character. This meant that the acting had to be top-notch.”

The innovativeness in that film, however, isn’t just to do with its narrative structure. I tell him that what appealed to me was how admirably the film eschewed emotion, which led Philip Cooray to call it an “intellectual film” in his review. “Cooray called it the closest the Sinhala cinema got to the Nouvelle Vague,” he says, “He even compared Willie Blake, who shot it, to Raul Coutard, who was the legendary Jean-Luc Godard’s cameraman.”

I come here to the subject of film movements and styles, and mindful of Sidney Lumet’s witty dictum of style being the “most misused word since ‘love’”, ask him whether he subscribed to any one set of theories when making films. He admits that it’s difficult for him to think of any one film movement, but does say that the Italian neo-realists moved him. “They were painters, actually,” he observes, “See how beautifully they depicted poverty. That’s what neorealism did. There are some commentators who say that it ‘died’ in continental Europe at the time Satyajit Ray and I took to it in Asia, and after Vittorio de Sica made Umberto D. All stuff and nonsense. Neo-realism never died. It never will die. Even the most ‘committed’ filmmaker is influenced by it.”

Lester reveres the neo-realists and holds them in esteem. No doubt this is to be seen in several sequences in Rekava, particularly those of village life playing out in real life. Still, this shouldn’t mean that he has reduced his entire outlook on the cinema to the Italians.

“What moved me in the works of de Sica and Rosselini was their fidelity to life. Look at a film like Bicycle Thieves. It’s timeless, no matter what one may say of it. In contrast, take a film like Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. Despite the ‘fire and brimstone’ allure in it, it merely encapsulated only one period of history. That’s why out of that entire film, we mainly remember the Odessa steps sequence.” He dislikes on-the-surface allure in films, and it would be unbecoming of me if I don’t say that he has to the best of his ability stuck by this principle in his career.

Apart from the neo-realists and the New Wave, what else has shaped Lester’s craft? I’m most certainly not a film critic, and an academic thesis is not what I’m aiming at here. Perhaps it is that spiritual quality which is to be found in pretty much every film of his. I ask him from where he got this quality, and he replies “from my country”.

I mention Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, and Carl Theodore Dreyer, three of the most austere, Christian, and spiritual filmmakers, and he agrees that they did move him. “Bresson is another idol of mine,” he states, “He made fewer films than I did over the same time period. But he had the support of the critical establishment of the day.” I ask him here why he didn’t make a Catholic film here, and not a little ruefully he says that he never got a good idea for a story with such a setting in the first place.

Lester is also a voracious reader, particularly of books on the cinema. I ask him whether he started out with books and theories, as some filmmakers are wont to do today, or whether he opted for experience as his biggest teacher. “Both,” he admits, “You must remember that I lived at a time when ‘criticism’ meant explaining an experience felt and lived through, unlike today, when what goes for criticism is academic hotchpotch.” He tells me that with the advent of postmodernism, film criticism became a pursuit for those who wrote from ivory towers. “As a result, serious cinema has become an intellectual pursuit.” There is a tinge of bitterness here, so I press him on.

“We were more open to experience back then. Today, experience is ‘written’ in the books you read. So you tend to think that you don’t need to get hands down to make films. I’m not saying that you need to grind your nose when pursuing artistic ambitions, but it’s also true that there is spontaneity and creativity in making films. This is inhibited when textbooks prescribe what ‘good filmmaking’ is and what it isn’t.”

Film criticism standards, he implies, are coterminous with film standards, and when the one begins to retire into an ivory tower, so does the other. I couldn’t possibly have agreed more with him. As a final point, he adds the following: “People like D. W. Griffith and Orson Welles learnt it the hard way. We are indebted to them because they made life easier for us. The only way we can repay that debt is by contributing to what they innovated on.”

It is here that we come to Satyajit Ray, who once called him his “closest friend East of the Suez”. I tell Lester that while many would like to compare him to Ray, there still must be those points of differences which separated them somewhere. He agrees with this. “Ray was a giant. His depiction of poverty was unpalatable to critics from both the East and West. He was the first Eastern neorealist. But he was also optimistic. Take any of his films, and you will understand just how he affirms human goodness. He never has villains in his stories. Humans are frail in his world, but in the end, they are vindicated no matter how imperfect they are. Sometimes, this makes his endings a little too optimistic to be real.”

I ask him whether he distanced himself from Ray’s attitude on this count, and he agrees. “Some of my stories have even been called ‘nihilistic’.” I ask him to elaborate on this.

“Take Delovak Athara. There’s no doubt at all that the ending is slightly pessimistic. But a happy ending was precisely what we WEREN’T aiming at. We wanted a dejected ending, one that would reconcile the protagonist Nissanka to his conscience. It was a way out for him, but it didn’t leave many viewers happy. There was one acquaintance of mine who pointed this out to me very frankly.

“According to this fan of mine, Delovak Athara had a promising start, built up to a promising climax, and then was corrupted by a very unsatisfactory ending. So in short what viewers wanted were happy endings. This is precisely the kind of mentality we were trying to do away.” He adds that even Sandeshaya upset a few viewers with its ending, where the entire village of the Sinhalese rebels is burnt down by the Portuguese without as much as a house or hut left intact.

Lester is not too unhappy with how our film industry is operating today. He cautions however that filmmakers should not go overboard with academia. “We have so many promising directors from the new generation,” he tells me, “They have realised that a film industry cannot subsist on state support alone. This is how an avant-garde culture of sorts has developed. It’s true that some of the films made by these directors can get amateurish, but in terms of honesty of treatment, they are spot on.”

I mention here about our collective dissatisfaction with the kind of populist, religious epics churned every year by directors who can hardly be called filmmakers, and he gently reproves me: “It’s true that they may not be professional filmmakers. But that doesn’t de-validate their films. It’s a personal vision which goes into their works. So raising a hue and cry against them isn’t very productive.” I tell him that most of these works bear a close (and unholy) resemblance to those of DeMille, and he agrees: “Every film industry has a DeMille.”

There’s more I can rattle on about, but perhaps Lester himself wraps it up best: “What we need is a robust film culture. Art cannot exist for its own sake. Form and content are best when together, not when apart. Unfortunately, I feel that some of our filmmakers, in their quest to be more controversial than others, ignore this. Whether this will continue or not will be a question on which the future on our cinema rests.”

Lester James Peries, as I mentioned above, is a book that has been authored by various people at various times. And yet, there is so much in him that has escaped the critical eye. He is undoubtedly a giant in this part of the world, precisely because he shares with both Satyajit Ray and Akira Kurosawa that one trait which proved crucial for the advancement of Asian cinema: the synthesis of East and West. Lester is no prig beset with conservative notions about filmmaking. The true worth of the man, I feel, is yet to be done full justice to. Until then, my countrymen and I can only wait. With baited breath.

Written for: Daily News TOWN AND COUNTRY, December 23 and 30 2015

Kumar de Silva's art of life

Pen-portraits are not easy to draw. What they sum up hardly goes by way of encapsulating a person's life and character in their entirety, and all too often the writer loses in substance what he tries to sketch as summary. The true worth or essence of a man, therefore, can only be caught through the eyes of the biographer.

Ethel Mannin, in her collection "Confessions and Impressions", says it best: "Greater than all art, more important than all the talking of art and life, this welter of sterile intellectuality which is the dry-rot of civilisation, is the art of life." It is life, and not the talking of it, that encapsulates a man. Biographers, in their rush to sum up and insert frill, never seem to notice this.

The point is that Kumar de Silva is a book that's been planned out, sketched, revised, and abridged. There are countless writers who've written on the events he has organised, the books he has authored, and of course his life-long association with France. Very few however would try to understand the man behind the show, free of frill and any predilection or bias the author has towards him. Mannin, I suspect, would have known this better than anyone else, were she alive today.

People dictate terms on their lives. They live as philosophers and intellectualise whatever experience they face. Kumar is a (mild) exception to that rule, I believe. True, he has until now demonstrated an abiding interest in orderliness, charting every nicety of his life to the last jot. As we conversed on a Sunday evening however, I felt at ease with a man who has come to symbolise a passionate and yet reflective attitude to achievement, indeed someone who has endorsed the notion that philosophising on life will get you only that far. He has, to my mind, several chapters that have not been looked into, by both critic and writer.

He is known for "Bonsoir". Many, even those who haven't watched it, will tell you that the show and the presenter went together. Kumar of course is far too modest to attribute it to himself, and anyone who buys and reads a copy of his Bonsoir Diaries will come away realising the collective effort that went into all those years. I suspect there's something more to him, though, something that defines what he has become. Getting to the essence of any man is not easy, after all, so I try to infer what it may be.

First and foremost, Kumar has always shown that he's a man who refrains from frill and show, who to the best of his ability remains both minimalistic and utilitarian. "I never opt for decor," he says, and by way of illustration he shows me his "garden", nested comfortably atop where he lives in Kohuwela. There's hardly any decor there. Everything he has grown and is tending to there, pithily put, has some utility and purpose, whether as food or medicine. "I judge almost everything on the basis of their use," he confesses.

Minimalism is notoriously hard to define, but seeing the way he has organised his life, I can say this much: there's nothing he takes in that he does not want later. "That explains why I'm not a passionate book collector," he explains to me. I am surprised, so he hastily elaborates: "That doesn't mean I'm not a reader. But if there's a book I haven't touched in five years, I give it away." Kumar privileges space. In a world that is getting fuller and fuller, that is rare.

This hasn't kept him back from pursuing different tastes, and it's to his credit that his eclecticism has dominated the better part of his career. He is a follower of the cinema ("Truffaut is among my favourites") and classical music, and he admits that while his "knowledge" in both may not be at its peak, he is still ardent enough not to be swayed by superficial allure. "I am at peace with nature and Art, and be it a van Gough painting that moved me when I had my first heart attack some years back or Truffaut's Antoine Doinel trilogy that refreshed my outlook on French life, I've tried to wed both in my life."

"Cultured" is another undefinable term. Again, it's to Kumar's credit that he has, time and time again, demonstrated what it should embody. In this respect, both Sri Lanka and France has left a deep impression on him. He has kept his feet in both countries ("My roots are in Ambalangoda, and I am an unabashed Francophile," he confesses) and he has to the best of his ability refrained from tilting to either side. Not everyone can bridge the gulf between van Gogh and Sarlis, but Kumar can.

And to me, that's what best sums the man. He presents a curious "contradiction", oscillating between the land of his birth and his "surrogate motherland" (I mean no insult of course, and I use that term candidly). On closer scrutiny however, this "contradiction" is not really a contradiction: he simply has varied interests, and he has wedded those with his life.

Not everyone can move with such ease and sureness as Kumar, and I guess that is what and everyone who has had the occasion to meet and be associated with him has been most taken in by the man. As if this wasn't enough, he himself offers comment: "Truth be told, it is my wish to be cremated here, and it is my wish to be scattered there." It's left to biographers to distill a man in his own words, but Kumar himself has done the job. Just like that.

There haven't been many interviews done of him, to be honest. Perhaps that's what has shrouded him in enigma. He has always given the impression that there's much more to him than meets the eye. He is correct. Interviewers indulge in sketches. Not in portraits. To me, everything that needs to be said about Kumar can be done so, not through clinical reflections, but through deep involvement with him. He at once betrays friendliness in its most simplified form, a quality almost never to be met with in others of his calibre.

Perhaps it's to do with his upbringing (Kumar's late mother, who taught me, testifies to this thesis: he himself credits his mother and father for allowing the unorthodox in him spring out, when he became the only student to offer French, German, and English for his A/Levels at Wesley). Perhaps it's to do with the career he managed to sustain for three decades: fulfilling and never in want of anything. Or perhaps it's to do with the kind of people he has hobnobbed with. We may never know.

Time doesn't permit these observations to end, unfortunately. Our most fervent wish, therefore, is that Kumar will stay on, enriching our cultural firmament (he has authored books on many leading artistes here, and we are grateful), whether from the sidelines or at the epicentre, and thereby adding to what we can look forward to, both as a community and as a nation. Rooted in one land and connected by spirit to another, he is a virtual cultural ambassador. The truth worth of the man, therefore, needs to be looked into. Until then, we shall have to wait.

That wait won't be long, we hope.

Written for: Sunday Island LIFESTYLE, December 27 2015

'Ho Gaana Pokuna': A Breath of Fresh Air

Not too long ago, I asked a prominent director to comment on our children's film industry. I told him that what are marketed as kids’ films are filled with elements that render such a categorisation crass and cheap. He gave his take on the subject: "That's because those aren't children's films. Those are films with children in them."

To me that summed it up pretty well, but I told him that this hardly offered consolation. He cautioned me against taking such a stand: "There'll come a day when we'll see films that capture children at their best. Until then, we can only hope."

That was two years back. I didn't know Indika Ferdinando then. I didn't know that he had made a film that would make the rounds with critics the world over. When he previewed it to sections of the media and film industry some weeks ago, there was at the end of it unqualified praise, unqualified not because Indika was an "established" director but because this realised the hopes and aspirations of Sri Lankan film-goers. Ho Gaana Pokuna, released to audiences here more than a week back, was a breath of fresh air. "There is room for hope", I thought to myself. And smiled.

Critiquing or praising a film made for children with the same criterion used for one made for adults is of course an injustice to both the work of art and its creator. Children’s films inhabit a universe of their own. That universe is (almost) always painted in black and white. Good triumphs, evil is thwarted. The ending usually resolves whatever dilemma the children in them may have been facing. Reality isn't rosy, but in this world it is. On these and other counts therefore, I admit it straight away: Ferdinando's debut does justice to the genre he's chosen to work in.

Notwithstanding all that however, a work of art is best judged by how well it brings together form and content without doing away with a live, human experience. Indika has fused his film together well in this regard. The spontaneity of his players (adult and child), the flow of the narrative, the themes it embodies, and the wider context to which all these relate can’t really be summed up in an article.

I saw his play "The Irresistible Rise of Mr Signno" recently, and I saw comedy throughout. Distilled and raw. He echoes this in Ho Gaana Pokuna. From the first shot – a sustained, uninterrupted sequence of Miss Uma (our heroine, played by Anasuya Subasinghe) by the beach and telling her lover that she's been posted as a teacher to an outstation school – we see comedy lurking in the background, always entertaining us but never transcending the flow of the narrative. This is the trap directors of family films are ensnared into: to subordinate the entire plot to displays of comedy, thinking that children don’t see anything else. Indika, thankfully, steps away from this.

What of the plot then? A detailed recounting would be superfluous and beside the point, but it basically begins with Miss Uma (fresh from University but not quite “out” of its political activity) opting to teach at an elementary school in Dombagamuwa. The school is housed by a set of children (almost straight from Neverland, it seems) and a formidable principal (Lucien Bulathsinhala), who all seem to have made it a world away from home. The principal, who also happens to be the school's only teacher, keeps his pupils in fear (to no avail: when at one point he imitates a dragon to keep them away from a piano sent by the World Bank, one of them chips in: "Nice performance, sir!").

The predictable unfolds: Uma is more liberal and understanding, gets closer to the children, and wins them and the entire village (including the principal) over. That comes in handy in the second half, when the children begin to clamour for the unthinkable: a trip to the beach. What happens thereafter, whether Uma and the principal get everyone to agree to their proposal, and whether they do to go on their trip, shouldn't be described in words. They must be watched.

What I noticed throughout was how Indika tantalisingly offered plot-lines that could have provided easy “opt-out” points for the narrative but withdrew them in time. It would have been easy (fatally so), for instance, to present an ideological clash between principal and teacher, but the script (mercifully) escapes such a contrivance. To their credit, both Lucien and Anasuya do what's expected of them, and in the end what we see in the former is an "old school" but by no means evil teacher. He is as pliable in the face of the plot as the rest of the village are.

Even in the sequence where Miss Uma convenes an Assembly in school, and debates with the principal over where it's headed (he is concerned whether "democratising" the school this way won’t “make farmers out of these children”), Indika doesn't dwell too much on the political: the debate ends then and there, and a few scenes later, the principal has been won over to his rival's side.

Because of this, not only the children (I'll come to them shortly) but the adult players also are convincing. Lucien Bulathsinhala gives his best, as expected, and so does the rest of the "veteran" cast, but it was Anasuya who caught me. 

As "Miss Uma", Anasuya depicts a woman who's tired of shouting against injustice, who yearns to act rather than parrot out slogans. She forms the epicentre of the film's ideology, which Dilshan Boange in an earlier review touched on (he calls it “centre-left” in a “broader context”, and to an extent I agree with him). Whether or not such a depiction is true to life and whether such idealists inhabit our world (at times she reminded me of Maria von Trapp and Mary Poppins in one go) are questions the serious critic must ponder on, but I admit it: she managed to sustain her portrayal of a teacher who gets over every obstacle, even when they lead to dead-ends (in which case other, less plausible coincidences set them right).

To their credit, the rest of the cast did well also. There was Jayalath Manorathna as Justin the bus-driver. When he enters into orbit with the kids, we see distilled, felt humour. Given that Manorathna has been featured in "children's films" before, it was refreshing to see him at his best: he sees no reason for lament when confessing that he drives without a license, but backs away like a confused, reluctant giant when Miss Uma, the principal, and all the children pester him into sitting for the driver's test. As for the others, Hyacinth Wijeratne, Dayadeva Edirisinghe, Jayani Senanayake, Wasantha Muhandiram, and Geetha Kanthi Jayakody don't disappoint. Not even once.

In short, the supporting characters are neither villains nor heroes. They are frail and impotent in the face of what dominates the script through and through: Miss Uma and her kids. To second-guess what this leads to in the end would defeat the purpose though. There's so much here that can be missed by the critic in his or her attempt at reducing the entire the plot to its final, predictable conclusion (and I am not connoting anything negative here, by the way: children's films by nature contain predictable finales, as they should).

What jarred a little was how Indika scripted his ending. Nothing in the script really prepared us for Uma crying out at the children playing in the beach. Nothing that unfolded before allowed room for the tears that she shed. What was even more jarring was how she brightened up at the sight of her lover, in a way which indicated that those tears were unnecessary. Thankfully though, that did not hinder the political, idealistic tone of her last few lines, and as the credits rolled I knew I was part of an audience who had been moved by her final speech.

None of this would have been possible without the child actors. To the film they contribute the kind of spontaneity and honesty only children are capable of. The witty dialogues, the dexterous and sudden shifts of moods (hovering between comedy and pathos) are made all the more nuanced by their performances. To say that they and they alone are responsible for the film's triumph would be stretching things too far, but I'll grant Indika this much: I didn't see artifice there. I saw honesty. With kids that's usually the case, but Indika (I feel) has scrounged something more out of them. Applause-worthy, no doubt.

Dinesh Subasinghe's contribution to the score merits special mention as well: it at once transports us to the children's world, and absorbs our attention to it, particularly in the final drive to the beach. That drive is set against a song-and-dance sequence that concentrates the entire story’s energy within itself, and submerges everything else in fantasy (especially when Miss Uma is stopped by a policeman, who lets her off when the kids plead with him: reality is not so rosy, I thought bitterly to myself).

And so I confess: I longed to go back to Indika’s world after it was over. Again and again. Not many films inspire such a feeling in me.

In Ho Gaana Pokuna therefore, we come across something we haven't in a long time. A (truly) children's film. I’m not suggesting that Indika's debut will salvage the industry. Far from it. But he has demonstrated such a sure grasp of the medium, with regard to camerawork, editing, scripting, and dialogues, that we can see an inherent love for cinema in it. On the level of intelligent storytelling, this works wonderfully well.

We are grateful.

Written for: Sunday Island LIFESTYLE, December 20 2015