1 week Ago By Sahan Weerasooriya
Asoka and Swarna’s Thrilling Melodrama – Part II“‘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 Almeidaby Shehan Karunatilaka (London: Sort of Books, 2022.
p84)(Continued from yesterday)The Promise of a Multi-Ethnic National CinemaThe Colombo premiere of Broken Promise (1947) was a national event, attended by D. S. Senanayake and business leaders as it promised much – the possibility of a popular national cinema that addressed a multi-ethnic polity and a profitable business.
People were bused into Kandy, where the film was screened in a large tent, and screened in several cinemas in Colombo and the suburbs. Certainly, from its inception the Lankan cinema was multi-ethnic in the composition of its creative artists (musicians, singers, actors, directors), technicians and producers, theatre and studio owners who provided the capital.Sumathy Sivamohan’s 2018 film Sons and Fathers explored this multiethnic creative hybrid ecosystem of the industry during the 1983 pogrom against the Tamil citizens of Lanka.
She modelled the musician in the film on the creative spirit of Rocksamy’s life and work so integral to the success of Lankan cinema. Sumathy researched the film by speaking to Mrs Rocksamy and incorporated a scene with her in the film. She spoke to impoverished old Tamil editors and the children of a musician to understand in some detail its multi-ethnic ecosystem and ethos of its lower-middle class creatives.
She then crafted these ethnographic musical insights into an intricate poetic film.Between Fact & Fiction: A Membrane/SkinSons and Fathers is a film that straddles the permeable boundaries between Documentary and Fiction films with a certain ease and confidence derived from its solid ethnographic research on the national film industry, its multi-ethnic artists and their lives. Sumathy does not proceed, as Asoka Handagama does, on the assumption that Documentary cinema is an entirely separate genre from Fictional genres.
She is aware of the over one hundred-year history of Documentary cinema itself, its diversity, cross-cultural richness and its play between categories. For example, take the case of Basil Wright’s award winning ‘Poetic-Documentary’ The Song of Ceylon (1933). Lionel Wendt provided the research for this film and his tender voice-over poetic commentary, and took Kandyan drummer Suramba to London to record his sounds for the film’s ‘Devil dancing’ spirit possession ritual sequences which make the film catch fire.
The film still has the power to haunt and vibrate us with its poetic cinematic intensity, the fictionalising power of its montage of sounds and images unchained from dogged documentary facts and realism.Asoka Handagama surely must know this Lankan film history too, but tactically insists on the absolute separation between the genres of Documentary (reality), and Fiction (prabandaya), in defending Rani against strong criticism that it distorts the real lived experience of Manorani and Richard. Swarna laughingly dismissed this valid criticism as ‘Nephew and Niece criticism’, in an interview she gave in Australia, when the film was screened here in private screenings at multiplexes.
But scorn and ignorance are not what we expect of senior artists of the calibre of Asoka and Swarna. They set a very bad example for the young, but perhaps young Lankans are cooler in their appraisal of such irresponsible behaviour and know it for what it is, ‘Neo-liberal ‘market-speak’.The film Rani by Asoka Handagama presents the 1990 political assassination of the popular journalist-actor-poet Richard de Zoysa, (the ‘bi-racial’ child of a ‘mixed marriage’ between a Sinhala father and a Tamil mother), and ‘theatricalises’ or ‘dramatises’ its impact on his mother Dr Manorani Saravanamuttu, during an era of extreme political terror in the South of the country, between the UNP Government and the JVP.
In naming the film Rani, Handagama appears to signal something because the ad tells us Sinhala folk that it means ‘Queen’. This metonymic displacement (a rhetorical strategy of taking a part for the whole), of the actual person’s proper name, ‘Manorani,’ into the dramatis-persona ‘Rani’, is further amplified and complicated by what Swarna Mallawarachchi has said about the character she played.Swarna’s 28-year-old PromiseSwarna has said that she had met Manorani four times after her son’s assassination, beginning in 1996 and that she had promised her that she would tell her story and that of her son to the world.
In this way she creates a certain gravitas, an ethic for her work on Rani, a sign of authenticity of a ‘true story’, testifying to a historical crime at the time of state terror and counter terror. True to her promise, she has said in recent interviews that she sustained her desire to play the role of Manorani for 28 years, at last realised in 2025 through the Indian production company LYCA’s capital.Tamil Entrepreneurship and Sinhala CinemaSubaskaran Allirajah, the CEO of LYCA films based in Chennai, is a Sri Lankan Tamil born in Jaffna and now a British citizen.
LYCA film production is a subsidiary of a Telecommunication company for sim cards he runs from Britain. His film list includes Mani Ratnam and many major directors working across popular Tamil, Hindi and Telugu films in India, with an immediate global reach with the large Indian diaspora.So, what sweet irony (after the violence levelled against Tamils who powered the Lankan film industry, burning the director Venkat in his car during July ‘83, but also later, with the assassination of Gunarathnam in his car, burning down of Tamil studios with Sinhala films stored therein and the proletarian movie theatres) that a Tamil business man from Jaffna has once again come to the rescue of the Sinhala cinema! As with Kadawunu Poronduwa in 1947, an Indian company, headed by a Lankan Tamil CEO has come to the rescue of a Sinhala film, with a Neo Liberal business model, kindling hope yet again for a national film industry, but this time with global dreams of access to streaming services such as NETFLIX and the like.
It would appear that Lanka’s Sinhala language cinema cannot do without Tamil enterprise.But it’s worth noting what S. Janaka Biyanwila says in his Polity essay:‘Lyca has also been a major donor to the Conservative Party in the UK.
In 2023, a French criminal court fined the company for tax fraud and money laundering. In 2024, the UK tax authorities demanded the company declare bankruptcy in order to pay overdue taxes. In 2018, LYCA acquired the EAP group in Sri Lanka with interests in media and entertainment, including television and radio channels and movie theatres.
Last year (2024), the Sri Lankan government blocked LYCA from bidding for ownership shares in Sri Lanka Telecom and Lanka Hospitals.’These monopolising moves of LYCA seeking ‘vertical integration’ of the film industry, should be front and centre even as some fans swoon over Rani and dream of a ‘quality’ Sinhala film industry revived by LYCA.The Unconscious of the Sinhala Cinema Genealogy (Vanshakathawe).
It is the Sinhala cinema’s unconscious, its ‘Other’ if you like, as expressed in Rani that I wish to render conscious in this piece. Let Rukmani Devi’s amaraneeya (undying) Shoka Gee (melancholy songs), and also that of Mohidin Baig’s Bhudu Gee once again cut through our sedimented Sinhala prejudices as we look back, both at our film history and its future at this critical moment.Asoka’s Sovereign Right to ‘Self-Expression’However, in contrast with Swarna’s promise to Manorani, Asoka Handgama says that as an artist (not a maker of documentary), he has exercised his ‘right to self-expression’ and has presented his own version of both Richard and his bereaved mother Manorani; in short, it is not a documentary, it’s fiction.
It’s obvious that these two views, (on one hand, that of the actor keeping to a solemn promise to be true to what happened (through a ‘bio-pic,’ as the Head of Production, Janaki Wijerathna maintained in an interview), and on the other, that of the director expressing his own creative artistic-self), contradict each other. The film anticipates the criticism that it falsifies the biographical true story by providing a pre-emptive defence through a sentence, before the opening of the film, that it’s a work of fiction based on fact. This defensive move is part of its publicity, it anticipates controversy, provides the terms for it.
I wish to side step this dynamic and shift the critical terrain, which is the professional task I set myself as a film theorist and scholar.The actress and the director seem to have two different understandings of their intentions and what it is that they have done. Swarna then obfuscates matters further by saying, ‘film is a director’s medium and as an actor my work is to follow his wishes’.
But Asoka has said that Swarna brought this project to him when LYCA came up with the money and he wrote it within 3 months with her in mind. It was not a film he had wanted to make, he said. He appears to have written a skeletal generic structure for Swarna to embody as she wishes, in her familiar high intensity, award winning mode of performance.
To Eat the Cake and Have ItTo put it differently, they want to both ‘eat their cake and have it,’ which is of course very good PR for the box office success of the film. ‘Eating the cake’ implies maximising and gratifying their own pleasure as artists, and ‘having it’ as in keeping the cake intact, means that the names of the historical mother and son are used as a strong historical referent both within the film and in its PR, but get distorted when it gets in the way of the artists’ own ‘self-expression’ and self-gratification. That there is an ethical dilemma here, as many have pointed out, is a point I wish to explore further by theorising the aesthetics of the film.
The invective one hears goes nowhere intellectually, but just feeds the publicity machine. Controversy is very good for promoting a film, creates a buzz, people want to see what all the fuss and excitement is about.The exceptional box office success of the film is no doubt also linked to Swarna Mallawarachchi’s stature as a serious actress with a proven track record of award- winning work with some of Lanka’s main auteurs.
And in being identified with Rani as Queen, at least one critic announced that Swarna is now a ‘golden super-star’. The logic of such hyperbolic marketing is of interest to me as a film scholar studying the public reception of films within the robust subfield of ‘Reception Studies’ and the kind of ‘public-spheres’ that competing discourses on a film generates, now especially, within a digitally powered virtual mediascape which is our democratic ‘commons’.As well, importantly Asoka Handagama is one of Lanka’s major playwrights and an unusual modern filmmaker in that he has developed an idiom of his own, with a distinguished body of work which in turn has created an educated cine-literate audience who followed it keenly over a significant period of time.
Therefore, Lankans are eager to see Swarna and Asoka present Dr. Manorani Saravanamuttu and Richard de Zoysa, a mother who was a Tamil professional woman and single parent and her very well-known and loved son, a journalist, actor and poet from the Lankan Anglophile upper-middle class, caught up in the extraordinary violence in the South, of the 1987-1990 era of extra-parliamentary politics of our island nation.Political TheatreThe other draw card is the explicitly political representation of key political figures of the era represented by actors resembling the politician more or less.
A thrilling novelty, it makes it structurally possible for Asoka to sketch the drama of the mother and son within the real-politic of the Premadasa era and even dramatize the bomb blast by the LTTE suicide bomber on a bicycle, which annihilated the president and others. LYCA’s Indian currency would have helped in staging the blast, as such destruction requires lots of money to execute with even a little credibility. This effort by Asoka is, in my opinion, a ‘third-world’ example because stage destruction, which cinema has perfected for profit in the genre of ‘Disaster movies’, requires much more than was available.
He was pandering I feel to our desire to see President Premadasa being blown up, along with the senior cop who Manorani unequivocally identified as the one who arrived with lumpen thugs to her house, to abduct Richard, to torture and kill him according to, as widely believed, the President’s command.This kind of violence, staged to excite and thrill, is the very stuff melodrama feeds on. The sonic ‘reverberation’ technically added to the sound of the abductors crashing into Richard’s house amplifies the melodramatic tension and suspense.
In contrast, the three firm taps on the infamous heavy-wood teak Jaffna door, in Sumathy’s A Single Tumbler, chills the sensorium of the viewer, where fear and thought commingle as one quiet voice ‘signifying the boys’ announce their intent to take the son away for questioning. In contrast, Melodrama disarms our thought processes as it works with orchestrating (with loud sound and manic editing), suspense and thrilling action, its raison d’etre. This is the source of its global attraction and popularity as a genre.
(To be continued).
