|
|
 |
 |
| Sunday, 26 October 2003 |
 |
|
 |
Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
|
Mansion by the Lake, the last splendour of a world slipping past by Samuel Blumenfeld
Sri Lanka has entered the race for the first time to vie for the coveted film award the Oscar awarded for the best foreign film. Nominations will be announced in Los Angeles on January 27. Winner will be chosen from five finalists at the Oscars ceremony on February 29. Wekanda Walawwa (Mansion by the Lake) by Lester James Peries is an adaption of the Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, and depicts the Buddhist aristocracy in Sri Lanka. "The past has more value than the present", one of the characters of Mansion by the Lake asserts. What is true for the great majority of the film's protagenosits also applies today to the Cannes Festival. At the age of 83, the Sri Lankan film-maker Lester James Peries seems to have remained impervious to the recent evolution of modern cinema, which has entered a numerical age symbolised by Matrix. The idea of a time passing and disrupting everything in its wake is at the centre of Mansion by the Lake. Lester James Peries' art sends us back to an age-old time, a suspended time in which, by some miracle, one gets the impression of witnessing the birth of cinema and the end of a world at the same time - that of the Buddhist aristocracy of the end of the 1980s in Sri Lanka. Today, Lester James Peries is making his comeback to Cannes, nearly fifty years after Rekawa (1956). The film is inexplicably presented out of competition within the framework of the Official Selection, we like to think that the Cannes selectors thus imply that Mansion by the Lake cannot be categorised, that it is too remarkable, too beautiful, too pure, too luminous for it to be subjected to a jury. Adapted from The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov, Mansion by the Lake freely takes up the story imagined by the Russian writer to adapt it, as freely as possible, to a Sri Lankan context. Through the account of a family's decline, we are faced with the most beautiful metaphor possible for a melodrama, which The Cheetah and The Splendour of the Ambersons already wove, the end of a world and the shift to another, a new one. From the first shot of Mansion by the Lake, we know that its owners will lose everything and that this superb middle-class house, passed on from one generation to the other, will escape them. The characters alone do not know this elementary truth. This is one of the great lessons of the melodrama: if the individual story and its memory of the past time do not have any weight in the face of History, nevertheless, there is nothing more beautiful than an individual who refuses this inevitability, taking refuge in memories. A mother, Sujata Rasuriya goes back to Sri Lanka along with her daughter Aruni to the gigantic family middle-class residence, where her brother lives. A black and white picture, which unexpectedly comes out of Sujata's bag, makes us understand that she is a widow. Quite another insignificant reflection on a great misfortune, which happened in this house, refers to her son's accidental drowning in the lake by the residence. Hence the importance of the English title of the film, Mansion by the Lake.....It marks out this residence by pointing at the place of a tragedy, while the French title Le Domaine (The Estate) remains vague. It also situates the metaphorical dimension of a place where the memories come back to the characters' minds, like the lifeless body of Sujata's son. Lester James Peries shows ever more complicated lives, the intensity of which one could not suspect, within a family circle where everyone's place is engraved on marble: the unhappy love affair of Aruni, madly in love with her private tutor, who prefers to join the revolutionary camp, the devotion of Sita, Sujata's sister, who has sacrificed herself to take on the responsibility of the family estate, Gunapala's inner drama, despoiled of his legacy for he could never get married. Labyrinthine space But this complexity fits in with the topography. It owes everything to Peries production and nothing to psychology. The space of the house and its labyrinthine architecture are taking shape as the characters' drama is gradually unfolding. The huge staircase, the actual heart of the residence, looks like a fully-fledged character, always filmed in a stylised way, with an expressionist light. Like in the final sequence, in which the face of Sujata, overcome with madness, multiplies, endlessly. The staircase turns into a gigantic monster, which will spew out its former owners. A feeling of inexorability is present throughout Mansion by the Lake. At the time when part of its characters ceases to grapple with History, Lucas, the former foreman now a businessman, suggests that 'one has to live with one's own time.' He is the one who will take it upon himself to sell off the house, exactly like at the end of Chekhov's play , in which the Cherry Orchard will turn into a sea resort. But Peries suggests another reason for the announced decline of the Rasuriya family. The decline is not due at all to the political upheaval and the new social order under way, but it stems from the very nature of the house, filmed like a living organism, over which watches a spirit of the place embodied by the incessant mist overhanging the lake. In its most heartening moments, Peries' film turns into a ritual in which those alive and dead, summoned in a same no man's land eventually merge. Mansion by the Lake echoes in this the expressionism and the mysticism in action in Voodoo by Jacques Tourner, another masterpiece in which the shores of Heaven and hell eventually meet. Translation by Sri Lanka Embassy, staff Paris France of an article in Le Monde, Friday 23rd May, 2003. |
|
News | Business | Features
| Editorial | Security Produced by Lake House |
