A Common Man and psychothriller

In this week’s column, we examine the importance of the genre psycho-thriller in cinema against the backdrop of A Common Man, Sri Lankan English move of international repute, making its mark in the arena of international films. The film was released in the USA.

A Common Man is a Sri Lankan English movie directed by Chandran Rutnam. The star cast of the movie included Oscar Award winner Sir Ben Kingsley and Ben Cross and debut actors Patrick Rutnam (as IP Mohideen) and Fredrick-James Koch (as IP Rangan Jayaweera) who played important supporting roles in the movie.

A significant factor, among other important features of the psycho-thriller, is that A Common Man won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor awards at the Madrid International Film Festival besides a bronze medal in the Feature Films category at the New York Festivals’ International Television and Film Awards.

Perhaps, it is for the first time that a Sri Lankan English movie has won a series of awards in the main category at an international film festival. What often happens is that Sri Lankan films have won awards in the category of foreign films or in side-bars at the festivals. The majority of the awards were in the category of artistic films in the typical French realistic movie mode.

A Common Man is the official remaking of the Indian thriller A Wednesday. Although it was a re-making of A Wednesday, filmmaker Rutnam has skilfully re-worked on the screenplay, making it extremely relevant to the Sri Lankan context.

The film commences among bomb making materials and newspaper articles about LTTE bombings in Sri Lanka. Then, the scene shifts to a typical busy morning in Colombo. “The Man” (Ben Kingsley) plants five bombs around the city; a public bus, a shopping mall, the Polgoda police station, an intercity train and the Katukurunda airfield. The man then establishes his mini control station on top of a skyscraper in Dehiwala and calls the police chief Morris Da Silva (Ben Cross) and informs him that if four prisoners are not released, the bombs will be detonated.

Psychothriller

Apart from winning the scores of awards at international film festivals, A Common Man warrants the close examination for the simple reason that the filmmaker has used a genre whose intrinsic properties and capabilities have not still been fully exploited by Sri Lankan fraternity of filmmakers.

A Common Man poses a vital question that why Sri Lankan filmmakers seem still reluctant to venture into different genres other than the dominant genres of films such as realistic and postmodern cinema. Mixing of genres, though common in international movie making industry, has not widely been practised in Sri Lanka.

Describing rather ambiguous nature of the term psycho-thriller in a paper entitled ‘Film genre and its vicissitudes: The case of the psychothriller’, Virginia Luzón Aguado observes, “ As a starting hypothesis, we could thus claim a similar status for the category “thriller”. Namely, it could be employed as a generic term under which we may include precisely detective films, police procedural films, spy films, political thrillers, courtroom thrillers, erotic thrillers or psychothrillers, that is to say “all films dealing with the perpetration or prevention of crime” (Grant 1995: 503), which share another common and structurally crucial characteristic: suspense.

It goes without saying that even though these different types of films have elements in common, we may also trace “exclusive” elements which would demarcate the boundaries of each sort of film. In the case of the spate of films that came to be popularly known as “psychothrillers” in the late 1980s and early 1990s, these elements may be reduced to two: the almost excessively paranoid stress they place on the family as an institution and the presence of a “monstrous” (because mentally deranged) figure, a “psychokiller” besieging the members of the families in these fictions. ”

Generic category

A significant characteristic of contemporary filmmaking as observed by Aguado, is the generic criss-crossing; “If the term “psychothriller” may seem to be only partially appropriate, this is because most films nowadays can hardly be accommodated within one single generic category. In this type of film, suspense is intermingled with features belonging to the horror genre, therefore, likely associations with both the thriller and the horror film are equally valid. It seems that the studios continue to produce films that are ambiguously typified and which critics, in turn, group into convenient labels such as “erotic thriller” or “psychothriller” to facilitate their own work.

As Altman perceptively puts it, we critics are the ones who have a vested interest in using generic terminology, which serves to anchor our analyses in universal or culturally sanctioned contexts, thus justifying our all but too subjective, tendentious, and self-serving positions.

We are thus the ones that see to it that generic vocabulary remains available for use, [even though]producers are actively destroying genres by creating new cycles, some of which will eventually be genrified. ”

Genrification still seems vague although the genre Psycho thriller demonstrates salient characteristics of horror films. Virginia Luzón Aguado observes , “ Since films must adapt to the times when they are produced, I would suggest that they inevitably strive to address various contemporary concerns to which different cross-sections of the audience can relate.

On the other hand, it seems that the studios will produce films that are ambiguously typified and which critics, in turn, group into convenient (though admittedly limited and not always fully adequate) labels to facilitate their own work, which often results in ambiguity and confusion, especially when their approximations are not sufficiently deep. It could be said that the “psychothriller” is a good example of this tendency, which leads me to a final consideration.

By straight jacketing more or less eclectic films (such as the recent psychothrillers) into specific but only partially suitable genres (such as the horror film), critics seem to be falling into the same ideological trap that the old genre system, with its stereotyped yet popular plots and characters and satisfactorily predictable resolutions, has been traditionally understood to pose.

But then it is only natural that they, like uncritical audiences, should try to make sense of the chaos around us. In an age of uncertainty, perhaps the best option would be to leave the issue of strict categorisation (is this a thriller or is it a horror film?) open to discussion. ”

The challenge that A Common Man offers for Sri Lankan filmmakers is not the question of genrification or criss-crossing of genres but to develop commercial sector of movie making in Sri Lanka so that Sri Lankan productions ( May be Sri Lankan English production) can carve out a niche in the multimillion international commercial movie market.