Sulanga Enu Pinisa

Sri Lankan cinema is largely known by the works of its grand old man Lester James Peries. This new film by Vimukti Jayasundara was made with the availability of foreign funds. This is the reason why there are many non sri lankan themes. There are certain films which are praised by critics for reasons unknown to the general public. This is precisely the case with this film. It has elements which one rarely sees in a Sri Lankan film. The depiction of war is so imaginary, completely different from the actual reality in contemporary Sri Lanka. This is something which has angered many natives of Sri Lanka. They accused the filmmaker of supporting the enemies of the nation. I had the misfortune of meeting this film's creator at a film festival. He had problems expressing his ideas. This can be the reason why he chose to have few sounds in his film. Watch it if you have nothing better to do in life.

Lovely to see -- but you aren't likely to favor it. Watching this on DVD, I soon found myself playing the skip game: using my player's skip feature, I would skip forward ten seconds when I suspected doing so would lose nothing. Then skip back, to see if I would indeed have missed something. Nine times out of ten, it was just the same shot, lingering, lingering ....

OK, lingering for a long time is a valid option, and the lovely visuals do deserve it. And there are scenes quite effectively done. My favorite is a simple right-to-left traveling shot, about fifteen minutes in. A woman walks right to left, but soon outpaces the camera, disappearing out of frame. A young girl runs in the medium distance, also the same direction. In the farther distance, a bus approaches, slowly coming toward the viewer, also angled toward the left. As the pan slows the camera arrives on the woman standing by a roadside tree, which the young girl and the bus reach at the same moment the woman and tree come into view. Three different speeds of motion, three different angles, but all moving to the left, and then arriving together: anchored by a tree which had been central to the composition of the previous shot. Pretty remarkable for a first film.

Film is both dreamy vision and a gripping tale of very tangible people tottering on the brink of despair. The tale unfolds slowly, but stunning visuals are so rich with atmospheric detail that I felt richly rewarded for the time I spent watching the landscape and people. The sound design, as the NYTimes reviewer pointed out, is praiseworthy for its evocative use of offscreen sources. All performances are convincing, the young girl particularly charismatic. That Sri Lankan officials have apparently objected is hardly surprising, but as far as their military brass is concerned: it's hard to feel sympathy with toes stepped on when they're clad in sturdy, polished military boots.

vimukthi jayasundara's debut feature is a film of surprising stillness and serenity. it strikes you by being so unusual and so brilliant at the same time. the film deservingly won the camera d'or for best first film at cannes this year.

the film is an expression of misery that is the result of many decades of civil war in sri lanka. the landscape comes across as desolate and an aura of death can always be sensed. the people living in this land seem robbed of their humaneness. they're like automatons, functioning for the sake of functioning. their only source of pleasure are brief, emotion-less sexual 'quickies'.

one filmmaker jayasundara is obviously influenced by is tsai ming liang (taiwan). like liang, jayasundara's characters are alienated from everything human. lonely, disconnected and indifferent to their own tragedy, they inhabit a world devoid of intimacy. but jayasundara goes beyond the mysteriously fascinating imagery of liang to create a more engaging and almost hypnotic film.

if you're expecting a film in which something happens all the time, or you're looking for overt meaning in every scene, this is not your cup of tea. there is very little dialogue. the film is full of long takes and moves at a leisurely pace. the director shows a kind of indifference to plot. a scene is not a build up to the future, the essence of the movie lies in each and every scene in itself. surrender your intellect, stop trying to find meaning, just put forward your hand like a child and let the film guide you through its desolate, detached beauty. unlike what many might say, this is NOT an intellectual's film. on the contrary, its a film that requires you to not use your mind too much and to view the film in an unconditioned way, not expecting it to go this way or that. it completely goes against what we are habituated to. the film's progression from a beginning to a middle to a climax is not important. life doesn't move like that.

vimukthi jayasundara clearly belongs to that set of directors who talk in a cinematic language that is liberated from the literary, plot-driven narrative. partially because i do not view this kind of cinema very often, the film leaves you with a sense of calm and an appreciation for its inventive brilliance. on the low side, the style is detached and distant and lacks the ability to manipulate your feelings like a well-crafted, plot-driven film. i don't quite know what to make of these feelings. its a film that you won't forget and will really want to talk about and discuss.

I watched this movie at the Toronto International Film Festival a few years ago. Don't expect to find a cohesive plot, but just sit back and let the camera-work wash over your senses. Long, beautiful, meditative, Tarkovsky-like takes that leave you marvelling at their artistry. Not long into the movie, I gave up trying to understand the plot, and instead just allowed myself to be swept along in its tide of visual beauty.

In the Q&A with the director after the screening, he couldn't or wouldn't shed light on the meaning/plot of the film, saying instead that it is up to each of us to get our own meaning. Commenting on his cinematography and obscure plot line, I asked the director whether he was influenced by Tarkovsky. He replied: 'But of course. Tarkovsky is our godfather'. Nuff said.

Rent/buy this movie and watch it on the biggest screen you can find. Don't try to understand the incomprehensible, but allow yourself, like I did, to shrug off the shackles of reason and intellect and float along a different stream of consciousness, one of astounding visual beauty.