Vidu:

Politically no change in Handagama

by Saman WICKRAMAARACHCHI

Asoka Handagama is generally known as a film director who produces films for the mature audience. However, his film Aksharaya has been barred from screening. It is noteworthy that his new film Vidu is considered a children's movie. It seems like that Handagama has ironically changed over to this particular genre of movie production. If the filmgoers in Sri Lanka are childish in taste, Handagama has no other alternative than offering them children films.

Scenes from the movie

For me, most of them are still to comprehend that he has screened Aksharaya by labelling it as Vidu. In fact, I see no change in his expression of ideological overview, which appeared in Aksharaya. No wonder if Handagama would decline to accept his new film as a children movie.

The plot of the Aksharaya is about a lovable relationship between a mother and her child. The child in that film was ignorant of society and his attachment was only with his mother’s body. Hence, he had to face many a problem when he was entering society and mother’s intervention in the child’s problems ended in a tragedy. Vidu is also a story woven around a mother and a child.

However, Vidu had already left his mother’s body and was running after substitutes for his lost mother or her love. Therefore, the society is not problematic to him but society was affected by his behaviour.

For me , if the membership of the Censer Board, as they calculate things according to their own moral attitudes had censored several scenes and released Aksharaya it would have drawn more attention of children than adults. (However, I do not for a moment condemn the right of Handagama to object to such a decision of censoring his film.)

Handagama takes the cinema screen as a mirror. I remember a certain mirror in Harry Potter called the Mirror of Erised, which was in Hogwarts the school of witchcraft and wizardry. Harry Potter used to stare at this magical mirror for hours and saw his lost parents in it. His close friend Ron observed in the mirror for himself having won the trophy for the magical game quidditch and become the captain of his team.

The mirror for Ron was a soothsayer about his dreams and Harry Potter took it as a divine gift to associate with his parents. However, Dumbledore, the head master of this school of witchcraft, disclosed to them that they did see nothing but their own fantasies. In other words, what they had seen on the glass were things they had desired to achieve in their life.

What would be the reality that emanates from the cinema screen which is considered as a mirror. It is important to think a child at the age of eighteen months before a mirror with its mother. Cristian Metz in The Imaginary Signifier observes this child’s experience as a perception of his own body as a whole.

“In the mirror the child perceives the familiar household objects, and also its object par excellence, its mother, who holds it up in her arms to the glass. But, above all it perceives its own image. This is where primary identification. (the formation of the ego) gets certain of its main characteristics: the child sees itself as another, and beside an other. This other is a guarantee that the first is really it: by her authority, her sanction, in the register of the symbolic, subsequently by the resemblance between her mirror image and the child’s (both have a human form).

Thus, the child’s ego is formed by identification with its like, and this in two senses simultaneously, metonymically and metaphorically: the other human being, who is in the glass, the own reflection, which is and is not the body, which is like it. The child identifies with itself as an object.” Cristian Metz stated all those things to set up the position that film is like a mirror. However, Metz admits that it differs from the primordial mirror: there is one thing and one thing only that has never reflected in it: the spectator's own body. The other aspect of this question is that cinema screen is not a realistic phenomenon and it only represents the reality. The film is always a secondary expression of reality and in which everything has been recorded.

It is important to note that analysis of Handagama’s cinematic practice should be done in such a logical context. The mirror Handagama refers to is the same one that Harry Potter used to look at. That is to say, we see in it not of ourselves but our desire. Hence, Handagama draws our desire on to the cinema screen. In the event speaking English fluently, as Vidu has done in the film, is to be identified as our own desire.

However, that is not the real face of the desire and the subject seeks for something else. That is none other than his lost mother. The subject however should satisfy the substitutes and the real desire remained as it is. The desire to speak English, nicely dressing, having luxury vehicles all are substitutes for desire we never will come to be aware of in our life. Therefore, the spectator identifies with her own desire.

The logical purview of this assertion could be comprehended in a comparative analysis of the film Aksharaya and Vidu. It is only in such an analysis that we would grasp the politics of Handagama in Vidu. In Aksharaya the mother being a Judge and having power of law was in a supreme position of society. She was compelled to take any risk for her son who had accidentally murdered a woman. However, the mother of Vidu being outlawed and a professional pickpocket earns money by such illegal means to maintain her child. For his mother, Vidu is her whole future. The woman judge in Aksharaya rebels metaphorically against her own past by destroying antics in a museum. The director thus let the spectator to read her own pathetic past. Those scenes in the film become realistic in such a fantasized way in reading the spectators own life. Most objected to the Aksharaya after reading in it their own unconscious.

The mother of Vidu has made a forceful effect to get free of her child from custody of the politician and it ended with the police arresting her. For me, the watcher in the Aksharaya seems to be metamorphosed to the politician in Vidu. Asoka Handagama selected the same actor, Saumya Liyanage, for the roles in both the film. The politician keeps the child confining him in his own house for his survival. In a similar way, the watcher in Aksharaya kept the child confined the child in his house for the money he received from its mother Judge. Thus, no difference is made between the respectable politician in Vidu and the mean watcher in Aksharaya.

It is noteworthy to observe that there is no difference between those two mothers though one is a judge and the other one is a pickpocket. Both mothers do whatever they need to do for their respective children. For each mother the child is a part of her own body. Handagama at this time has chosen ironically a woman pickpocket instead of a lady judge. In the circumstances, I observe no change in politics of Handagama. His politics is none other than his expressionist outlook cast upon society. In which he reads the spectator and let her to see her own unconscious reveals on the screen.

The child who looks through the mirror to see him and identifies himself. Though the film screen is in the view of Cristian Metz considered to be a type of mirror the spectator does not see her image in it. Thus, in my view, the spectator has to identify not her body but her own desire. Some sections of Sinhalese Buddhists opposed Aksharaya not for any particular reason but they feared to see their own naked unconscious screening in public. If the Aksharaya had been allowed to be released it would have been successful as a film even from a commercial point of view. Nevertheless, it would not be due to Handagama’s political ideology but it is because of his simple expressionist narrative style.