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| Sunday, 30 May 2004 |
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FILM REVIEW : Suriya Arana: a beautifully crafted lie by Malinda Seneviratne The film has enjoyed unqualified salutations from all quarters since the day it was released. The newspapers told me it was beautiful. Told me it was a family movie. It was supposed to be a breath of fresh air. Someone even said it was a landmark in Sinhala cinema. A lot of hype. I succumbed. I went to see the film. Suriya Arana was beautiful. Visually pleasing. A good location, good cameraman and a competent editor will always produce something idyllic, if the director so wants it. Somaratne Dissanayake knows all this, obviously. There was not much to fault with the acting either. Jayalath Manoratne, as the 'loku hamuduruwo,' was certainly adequate. Jackson Anthony as Sediris, had the more challenging role, and I believe he played it to perfection. The child actors showed promise. They were by and large the children that they are and did not let their respective roles curb their natural function of simply being children. I saw all this and appreciated it all. And yet, I did not see the great film that the critics had talked about. I thought Suriya Arana was better than Saroja in that there was less caricaturing. It was pedestrian nevertheless. The overriding theme, the virtues associated with the first precept, was poorly disguised, perhaps deliberately so. Not that disguise is a must, of course. Still, it got boring after a while. Dissanayake gave the distinct impression that he believed the general filmgoer to be so moronic that his message had to be drilled into his/her thought streams. Suriya Arana is, all things considered, a mere re-enactment of the classic duel between good and evil, personified by the 'loku hamuduruwo' and the 'dadayakkaraya', Sediris, respectively, and moves towards the predictable denouement of the former triumphing over the latter. There is absolutely nothing new here. Take any random Hindi movie we get on TV and you would find the same thing. Nuance of human nature One would have expected the unwrapping of the contest to reveal something interesting or different, some nuance of human nature that provoked reflection and debate, but this was not to be. Instead, the unfolding, cluttered with cliches, only served to propagate ideologically dangerous postulates. The 'dadayakkaraya' is hemmed in on all sides. Of course the overflowing karunava and maithriya plays a part, but the damanaya of the beast, so to say, is in the end obtained by force of circumstances (including physical intimidation) and not by the logic of the dhamma. He is insulted and humiliated. His means of livelihood is taken away from him for all practical purposes. There is no renunciation as such. He is a victim of a trap he himself had laid, but he is driven towards it by the violent intent of a community paradoxically enraged out of concern for the 'loku hamuduruwo's' safety and well-being. The man is left without choice! The whole thing smacks of unethical conversion. The relationship of the 'podi hamuduruwo' and Sediris' son, on the other hand, seems to work better, possibly because there is less ideological trappings in the dialogue. Indeed, the unfolding of their friendship shows exactly what is wrong with the script. The more heavily ideology-driven any text is, the greater the likelihood of it coming off as contrived. In this case, it was painfully evident. Somaratne Dissanayake clearly demonstrates that he is not incapable of appreciating nuance and complexity. The 'dadayakkaraya' is certainly not your run-of-the-mill butcher. He possesses an operative logic consistent with the cosmology of his faith. He has his own definition of violence and this is located in a clear conceptualization of what is virtuous and what is vile. The articulation of all this does question the uneasy dichotomy of civilized and uncivilized, I agree. And yet, I could not help thinking that Somaratne Dissanayake had drawn the character from Simon Navagaththegama's Sansararanyaye Dadayakkaraya, Sansararanyaye Urumakkaraya and Dadayakkarayage Kathava. The principal difference is that Simon's hunter is a believable character operating in a believable social universe. There is another, more subtle difference. In Simon's story, ideology moves throughout the story like a thread, holding together and weaving event, personality and metaphor. In 'Suriya Arana,' it is a garment, a mere trapping. Maybe I do not know enough about the period and the social context, but a mas veddah displaying his wares in the kadamandiya somehow does not ring true. If there was game meat, word got around, and those who wanted could get it. Then, as it is now. Violence I was disturbed by the violence. One could argue that an anti-violence film cannot be totally free of violence, for that would reduce it to an intellectual debate and nothing more. At the same time, Dissanayake, working on the moron viewer, has found it essential to throw in a lot of violence, just so he can pontificate on it and its outcome. It is certainly not a "film for all ages". I do not subscribe to the view that children should be totally cocooned from the horrors of the world, but there is far too much violence in this film than can be absorbed by children. There were a couple of high points in the film for me. The theme song and its attendant visuals were exquisite. The problematising of violence through the interjection of the colonial agent cum elephant hunter was brilliant in its execution. That scene alone gave context to the issue of violence. Why did Somaratne Dissanayake leave it hanging, though? He asks the question "how civilized is civilized man?" in this exchange, but leaves it at that. One could argue that the damanaya of the white man would take an entire film to relate. I am willing to buy that, although I am not sure if compassion alone would do the trick, although Dissanayake seems to want us to believe this to be sufficient. In Suriya Arana, the 'dadayakkaraya' is dismembered, literally and metaphorically. He appears to be at peace and reconciled to his losses and his fate at the end. So too can a slave, similarly incapacitated. I left the theatre with the conviction that I had been suckered in to see this film. FOOTNOTE: Barely 20 minutes into the film, my little daughter burst into tears and voiced her opinion on the film: "Eeeya, meka ketha kathavak, mata ba balanna." The opinion of a three-year, old critic would not in any way be the final word on a film. I could not help thinking that if the ketha was replaced by boru which means the same thing in assessing art outside of that which is supposed to evoke the "jugupsa rasa", she would have been absolutely spot on. |
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