1 week Ago By Thilina Walpola
“‘Dr. Ranee Sridharan,’ you say. ‘Nice to see you again.
’The woman in the white sari places a thumb in her ledger book, adjusts her spectacles and smiles up at you. ‘You may call me Ranee. Helping you is what I am assigned to do,’ she says.
‘You have seven moons. And you have already waisted one.’” The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (London: Sort of Books, 2022.
p84) The very first Sinhala film Broken Promise (1947), produced in a studio in South India, was a plucky endeavour on the part of the multi-ethnic group who powered it. Directed by B.A.
W. Jayamanne, it introduced the classically trained Tamil singer and stage actress in the Minerva Theatre Company, Daisy Rasamma Daniels, as Rukmani Devi, (who was the only real star of the Lankan cinema at the height of its mass popularity), to an avid cinephile audience of Ceylon who had grown up enjoying Hindi, Tamil and Hollywood films. The producer of the film, S.
M. Nayagam, an Indian of Tamil ethnicity, skilfully negotiated the production of the first Lankan film in Sinhala in his South Indian film studio in Madurai because Ceylon had neither the film infrastructure nor the technical know-how to do so. A Tamil singer/actress and a Sinhala director were the Ceylonese ‘capital’, both of whom had to learn on the run, the craft of filmmaking.
Rukmani Devi and Swarna Mallawarachchi There is a rather strange parallel between the Tamil Rukmani Devi, playing Sinhala women throughout her entire career with impeccable professionalism, great devotion and love, and the Sinhala Swarna Mallawarachchi, playing a Tamil woman for the first time, in Rani, but quite late in her career. In terms of their careers as independent, self-made film actors these are, undoubtedly, professional achievements of cultural significance for our multi-ethnic, highly stratified, Island nation with its 28-year war. But Rukmani Devi’s career began with the very inception of Lankan cinema when she was quite young and ended all too soon, when she was no longer young enough to play lead roles.
However, she continued to earn a living singing at live carnival variety shows, until her tragic death in her 50s. But Asoka Handagama’s Rani arrives in the era of digital cinema when the mass audience for cinema had diminished greatly, given the easy access online. Also, the Sinhala cinema as an Industry, such as it was, with production, distribution and exhibition of films in cinemas across the country, at scale, and the film-culture that sustained it for several decades does not exist any longer.
It’s mostly only Hollywood blockbusters and a handful of films that draw an audience to a theatre. Scandal and controversy play well to draw folk into a cinema sometimes and a brilliant actor can also do this. The example of Australian actress Cate Blanchett becoming a Hollywood star, in Tar (2023), comes to mind.
Now most Hollywood films go straight to Netflix and other streaming services with a short theatrical season. And Indian independent cinema and TV series do get on to Netflix with their high production values, unique genre traditions, star systems and a large diaspora for films in several Indian languages – Tamil, Hindi, Telugu. Swarna’s over 50-year acting career, now in her 70s, has had a very rare boost going by the controversial public reception of the film and its related box office success.
However, that this success is the result of having played a remarkable Lankan Tamil woman, a professional, appears not to be of much interest to the many Sinhala critics I have read or heard online. Apart, of course, from a mention in passing that Manorani Sarvanamuttu was a doctor with a patrician, Tamil, Anglophone ancestry, her Tamil ethnicity does not figure centrally in the discussions of the film and of Swarna’s performance itself. In fact, apart from the adulation of her performance as Rani, I have not found as yet any substantive intellectual discussion of her choice of a style of acting and of its aesthetic quality and indeed the politics it implies.
As an actress with a highly distinguished filmography, beginning with Siri Gunasinghe’s Sath Samudura (66), with major auteurs of Lankan cinema, this is indeed a strange omission. In this piece I am particularly interested to explore Swarna and Asoka’s choice of ‘a Melodramatic Style’ of acting, to represent Dr Manorani Saravanamuttu as Rani. She who was a Tamil, Christian, professional woman who, after her son’s assassination, chose to become a public figure, leading a movement of largely Southern, Sinhala-Buddhist women in ‘The Mothers’ Front’ demanding justice for their ‘disappeared’ loved ones during a period of terror in the country.
Tear-Gas Cinema People I am also thinking of the 2022 ‘Aragalaya/Porattam/Struggle-generation’ in particular, who would have a keen interest in Rani for political and ethical reasons and more specifically all those brilliant protestors who joyfully constructed the ‘Tear Gass Cinema’ in the heart of Galle Face, which was torn down by thugs instigated by Mahinda Rajapaksa himself who appears in Rani as an aspiring politician who cunningly uses the Mothers’ Front to power his political future. As cinephiles, they would no doubt be also interested in the film’s aesthetics, its realpolitik, gender politics and psycho-sexual violence, in an era of all-pervasive terror. Manorani’s Tamil Ethnicity Manorani’s Tamil ethnicity and its implications will be at the forefront of my inquiry, especially because her Tamil identity appears to be central to Swarna’s own fascination with her and desire to perform the role of Manorani as the bereaved mother of an assassinated charismatic son.
‘Fascination’ and ‘desire’ are dynamic, complex, psychic energies, vital for all creative actors who take on ‘difficult’ roles, especially female ones, in theatre and film. Consider the generations of distinguished Western actors who have played roles, such Lady Macbeth (Shakespeare’s Macbeth) or Medea (Euripides’ Medea) who killed her children to avenge her husband for abandoning her or Clytemnestra (Aeschylus’ Oresteian Trilogy) who killed her husband Agamemnon to avenge his killing of their daughter Iphigenia in the Classical Greek tragedy. These are not characters one can like, but an actor who incarnates them must find something fascinating in them, to the point of obsession even, so as to inhabit them night after night in the theatre credibly, in all their capacity, as the case might be, for passion and profound violence.
Perhaps not incidentally, Manorani Sarvanamuttu did play the role of Clytemnestra at the British Council with Richard de Zoysa, her own son playing either the role of Aegisthus, her lover or her son Orestes who is duty bound, fated, to kill her because she killed his father the king. I saw this production of The Libation Bearers (the second play of the Trilogy), but can’t remember the exact year, perhaps 1988 nor the role Richard played but do remember Manorani’s powerfully statuesque presence, her poise and minimalist gestures, performed in an open corridor with high pillars, facing the audience seated on chairs arranged on a very English lawn modulated by a setting tropical sun. The texture of her voice was soft but strong, the timbre rich, I recall.
She didn’t need to shout to project her voice, though it was an open-air show. She was an experienced amateur actor working with the playwright and director Lucien de Zoysa, who she married and had Richard with. Modulating a Gift: A Female Actor’s Voice But now that I have heard, while researching this piece, Manorani’s speaking voice (not her theatrical poetic voice as Clytemnestra the regicide) on a documentary film made after Richard’s death, I do think that hers was a singular ‘Ceylonese’ voice.
That ‘Ceylon’ ceased existing once upon a time, except in memory, a memory popping up by chance on hearing a voice, that most fragile of memory traces with the power to make palpable, time lost. Rukmani Devi is the only actor in the Lankan cinema of the early period who had a deep, textured, resonant voice with perfect pitch that perhaps reached the famous two octave range in singing, as Elvis Presley famously possessed. A star of the Hindi cinema once said that with that voice, had Rukmani Devi been an Indian she would have had quite a different career and that she did have an ‘operatic voice’, that is to say one with considerable power, range and texture which she was able to modulate to create feelings that we Lankans still respond to hearing her songs.
The problem was that the dialogue written for her in the popular genre films was melodramatic in the extreme, formulaic, often laughable, and the delivery also similarly stilted. Her singing created and sustained the intensity of the films despite the slight lyrics. Radio, records and cassettes spread her voice and also Mohidin Baig’s, right across the country.
She spoke an ‘accent-less’ Sinhala, without a trace of her Tamil mother tongue inflecting it. The Aging Female Actor It’s a fact well known that when female film-actors pass their youth, their roles diminish rapidly. But in striking contrast, male actors do go on acting until they are quite old and even have romantic scenarios written for them with young women old enough to be their granddaughters.
Feminist film theorists have written about this stuff and brilliant leading female Hollywood stars have spoken out about this and taken productive action, on occasion, to rectify it. There simply are no film roles for female actors when they reach maturity of age, experience and technical skill, unlike in theatre, unless playing the role of an ‘aging actress’ of 50 refusing to accept career death so soon, as in All About Eve with Bette Davis. Kadaima, the recent film Swarna performed in, directed by a surgeon on leave, Dr.
Naomal Perera, was promoted as sequel to Vasantha Obeysekera’s classic Dadayama. Kadaima appears to have fizzled out trying a feeble pun on Dadayama with typical melodramatic plot contrivances of coincidences. But in Dadayama Swarna created an unforgettably powerful performance directly related, it should be emphasised, to Vasantha’s brilliant direction, script based on a notorious crime and complex editing of sound and image.
Like Sumithra Peiris, Vasantha was also trained in filmmaking in France. After Dadayama’s success in 1983, the chance to perform a challenging role so late in her career, linked to yet another ‘true crime’, would have been an irresistible opportunity for Swarna as a mature and highly experienced award-winning actor. An analysis of her style of performance follows, in relation to the Rani script and direction because they are integrally linked.
But at first, I want to create a historically informed, intellectual framework irrespective of whether I like the film or not. By ‘history,’ I mean Lankan film history, a history of film acting within the context of the history of political violence, especially the political terror of 1987-1990 and its aftermath during the civil war years. I do so because Rani has created what the Australian Cultural Studies scholar Meaghan Morris has theorised as ‘a Mass-Media Event’.
“An event is a complex interaction between commerce and ‘soul’; or, to speak more correctly, between film text, the institution of cinema and the unpredictable crowd-actions that endow mass-cultural events with their moment of legitimacy, and so modify mass-culture”. The crowded discourse on Rani in the South is noteworthy, and appears to be unprecedented. This fact alone warrants a considered analysis beyond simply stating our individual likes and dislikes of the film, defending the film or criticising it.
As a scholar working within the field of Cinema Studies, one is ethically bound to explore and analyse such ‘Media Events’ rationally and imaginatively, making clear one’s theoretical and other assumptions. In doing so, others may engage with the terms of my argument without being abusive. In such work, aesthetic and ethical values are not, in the final analysis, separable categories even as one is cognisant of the monetary value of films at this scale of production and the importance of box office revenue and the advertising machine that powers it.
Often, in the history of cinema, these values have been in conflict with each other but as an ‘industrial art’, its very condition of possibility. I am drawn to filmmakers who burn so much time and energy to capture on film a few moments of intensity, intimate vitality that enriches life ..
. all life, that propels us to think the unthinkable. This is why cinema matters, this is why the history of cinema has many, too many, martyrs.
(To be continued) by Laleen Jayamanne.
