| An
influential maiden effort
By Carlo Fonseka
Inoka Sathyangani's maiden film is a passionate affirmation of the
sanctity of human life. It rejoices in the sensuality of healthy,
vigorous, youthful sex. It hints at the abysmal ignorance of young
women in our prudish society, about the basic facts of life. It
implicitly makes the case for sex education of adolescents. It questions
the rationality of our law on abortion. It demonstrates how the
law on abortion permits doctors to exercise their propensities for
greed and fraud without compunction.
Perhaps unwittingly,
it provides insight into what a physiologist would recognize as
tranquilizing sex, pair-formation sex, and pair-maintenance sex
(as opposed to procreative sex). Realizing, no doubt, that she had
bitten off more than what a maiden film-maker can possibly chew
in the realistic mode, she has imposed on the bulk of the film the
format of a fantastic dream sandwiched between two episodes occurring
during waking hours.
A waking
dream
If the film is essentially about a dream, does it depict
reality? Inoka Sathyangani who is responsible for its story, screenplay,
direction and production, says that Sulang Kirilli is based on a
true story. Her film art seems to imitate nature. Dreams are part
of human life and Shakespeare's Prospero goes so far as to say that
“We are such stuff as dreams are made of.” So there
is no reason why dreams cannot be used to explore reality. Who knows,
Inoka Sathyangani may have had a dream like the one Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King had in 1963; and Sulang Kirilli may be its cinematic
documentation! But this film is not a documentary. Therefore it
must be a fiction-film, which probes a real life problem in all
its intricate complexity. Inoka Sathyangani is clearly a cinema
buff and the film is replete with symbolism and technique. In fact
in one or two places I found myself wondering whether film technique
wasn't overpowering film art.
To an old medic
like me the pervading theme of the film - an unanticipated and unwanted
pregnancy and the consequences thereof - is neither novel nor shocking.
Inoka Sathyangani's elaboration of the theme, however, held my sustained
interest. Sulang Kirilli deserves to be seen by all intelligent
adults with a sensitive conscience who wish to let themselves bump
into current social reality. Being the creation of a young woman
with an independent and controversial cast of mind, Sulang Kirilli
does have the potential for becoming a tremendously influential
film.
Rules
of the game
The film opens in the waking world with an unmarried, rustic,
young woman, living away from home as a worker in a garment factory,
learning for sure that she is pregnant. Her lover happens to be
a soldier who has put his life on the line in order to preserve
the physical integrity of his motherland. Biologically speaking,
the purpose of sex is reproduction, and in the natural world, when
a young woman discovers that she is with child, she should feel
fulfilled and jump for joy. No longer, however, do we live in a
state of nature. Unlike in the animal world, society has imposed
cultural and ethical norms on sex and reproduction, which vary enormously
from place to place and from time to time. In a given society at
a given time, the prevailing norms demand conformity, and the price
to pay for defying them could be terrible.
Picking
a ‘solution’
But to return to Sulang Kirilli: for the young woman in
the film, life itself becomes a bastard when it transpires that
her soldier lover is a married man with a pregnant wife. He turns
out to be a duplicitous, selfish, brutish character. Everybody including
Inoka Sathyangani knows that in our country the kind of ruthless
self-interest manifested by this character is best exemplified by
our doctors, who strike at the drop of a hat realizing full well
that such action may kill poor, innocent patients. But, of course,
she couldn't have credibly cast a medic in this role of impregnator
because medics know all about contraception, and if contraception
fails, how to procure cheap, safe, abortions.
The soldier's
knee-jerk reaction to the pregnancy he didn't know how to prevent
and anyhow doesn't want is to procure an abortion. For his part,
he somehow materializes the big money required for the illegal operation.
The young woman is plagued by mental conflicts and attacks of conscience.
She considers various options open to her. What is the most practical
solution? What is the most expedient solution? What is the solution
that will most please a lover? What is the right solution? She is
torn between these options but finally decides that she will let
her child into this world.
The substance
of the film tracks her lonely course over a stormy ocean of anguish.
Not to a safe harbour, but to a toilet in a shanty, where the child
somehow enters the world by itself. What a price for a lovely woman
of the 21st century to have paid for no greater crime than following
her healthy, natural, biological instincts. Her fate is almost identical
to that of the lovely woman who stooped to folly in the 18th century
and found too late that men betray. Oliver Goldsmith immortalized
her in a memorable verse. Inoka Sathyangani's Sulang Kirilli is
a memorable cinematic parable of the same problem.
Rathi’s
story
The film revolves round four principal characters: the garment factory
worker (Rathi), her mother, her friend Vijitha, and her soldier
lover Shantha Bandara. The role of Rathi is played with understanding
and emotional maturity by Damitha Abayarathna. Rathi has fallen
in love with a virile soldier and frolics with him in gay abandon
until the inevitable happens. She dreams of a blissful life of married
happiness until she discovers the worst about him. Then trouble
begins. She copes with it remarkably. Her advocacy of the right
of her child conceived in love but out of wedlock, to life and dignity
is compelling. Her lambasting of her impregnator's patriarchal attitude
is devastating and often reduces him to a simian whimper. She has
what it takes to survive in what is for her, probably the worst
of all possible worlds.
The role of
Rathi's mother is portrayed with aplomb by Grace Ariyawimal who
is the embodiment of solid traditional Sinhala womanhood. Jayani
Senanayake sensitively depicts the nature of true friendship in
her role as Rathi's friend, through thick and thin. It must be of
such people that the Dhammapada says visvasa parama gnathi (the
trusty are the supreme relatives). The women in the film are all
admirable.
Honourable
discharge
Linton Semage, the superb character actor who specializes in the
realistic portrayal of socially obnoxious men, has been cast for
the role of the soldier, Shantha Bandara. He is a man obliged to
leave behind his home and risk his life in the North, for the sake
of his country. He turns out to be a nasty, brutish, lustful villain,
who is engaged in impregnating women when he is not fighting in
the North. Sulang Kirilli depicts accurately the relationship between
nervous tension and sexual indulgence.
It is understandable
in physiological terms. A soldier at the front waiting for battle
is in a state of high nervous tension. Faced with an overdose of
frightening, conflicting stimuli, he tends to seek escape in the
performance of an act he knows to be tension relieving.
As Desmond Morris
says, "The soldier at war, waiting for battle.... may seek
momentary peace in the arms of a responsive female" (see: The
Human Zoo, 1969). This kind of sex is what he calls 'tranquilizing
sex'. On the occasion when distraught Rathi was non-responsive,
Shantha Bandara did not rape her (as soldiers habitually do when
they invade enemy territory). Instead he relieved himself by self-indulgence.
So he was not an unmitigated brute. And the sexual activity depicted
in the film is what physiologists would recognize as wholesome "pair-formation
sex", "pair -maintenance sex" and "tranquilizing
sex". What it was not intended to be was "procreative
sex".
Patriarchal
response
If Rathi had been taught the elements of family planning when she
became an adolescent and therefore capable of attaining motherhood,
her story would not have been the tragedy that it became. Perhaps
that is the moral Inoka Sathyangani wished to convey through Sulang
Kirilli. If, however, Rathi had received adequate sex education
in the higher forms at school, Inoka Sathyangani would have been
hard pressed to find a socially relevant and important theme for
her maiden film. After all, it was the blissful ignorance of a young
woman that resulted in the true story on which Sulang Kirilli is
based. |
