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| Sunday, 23 February 2003 |
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Encircled by Questions of Identity Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake The first thing which strikes you about Asoka Handagama's new film titled 'Thani Thatuwen Piyambanna' is that none of its characters have names. There are women masquerading as men, a woman who lives with such a man knowing well his/her real identity, a doctor who runs an abortion clinic, a lascivious garage-owner and other sundry characters but they remain nameless. This is integral to the story line since the whole film is about identity, the dichotomy between man and woman, the exploitation of women in society and the existential anxieties which seize all of us in a fast changing society. To begin with the story demands a certain willing suspension of disbelief. This is because the central character is a woman who assumes the guise and garb of a man and living with a woman who knows this person's real identity. But this central character played by Anoma Janadari chooses to work in the very macho world of a garage where he/she is pitched into all kinds of confrontations which threaten to expose his/her real identity. There is an element of fantasy here because repeatedly the main character insists that he/she should be allowed to live his/her dream. This dreamland is well constructed within the confines of the Galle Fort (the terrain incidentally of another path-breaking film Prasanna Vithanage's 'Pawuru Walalu' which suggests the ossified social structure in which the characters are trapped. The film cuts from the macho garage world to that of the football players in the yard of the flat and the ballet-like sequence of the daily round of life led by the two main characters played most of the time to the accompaniment of loud Hindi music. The sleazy lower middle-class flat environment offers the best possible foil to the playing out of this human tragi-comedy with its inevitable tragic consequences. The film turns on the fact that the main character is fancied both as a woman as well as a man and Anoma Janadari plays the role to perfection. Her change of features is so good that she suggests the androgynous character beyond compare. The film exhausts the range of human sexuality. The abortionist played superbly by W. Jayasiri is titillated by the fact that this man is really a woman confessing that he was jaded by sex because of the nature of his profession while the garage owner who has affairs with all his secretaries is turned on by the same fact. At the same time the main character is also pursued by a fellow worker who fancies him because he is a man. This is the whole story of his/her final doom played out against the backdrop of the abortion clinic where a whole series of women like a Greek chorus come to lament that they had stooped to folly. Handagama also employs a series of playful techniques. The sequences between the garage owner (Wilson Gunaratne) and his secretaries suggest a sense of the absurd while some of the largely night sequences at the bus halt have a studiedly stylised air. But running through the whole film is a sense of how sex is exploited in all kinds of ways from that of women being raped to that of a man repeatedly dragging his relacitarant lady by night. The film is bound to create controversy because of its final nude sequence. Handagama has already being excoriated by the likes of Henry Jayasena for showing his own wife (Anoma Janadari being his spouse) in a full frontal nude. But this is absolutely integral to the film and is tastefully done. That sequence and he/she being hustled out only to appear minutes later in a frock in her real personality with his/her wife wailing behind the Police jeep are some of the most poignant sequences of recent Sinhala cinema. Handagama has already been attacked for making a calculatedly controversial film with an eye on foreign audiences. Perhaps no other film to date has been shown at so many international festivals before being released in Sri Lanka. But Handagama's achievement in questioning both the problems of sexuality as well as lower middle-class life in Sri Lanka and the challenge he makes to our social conscience has to be applauded. |
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