Arts
When the music dies
Despite the discomforts of entangling oneself in pigeonholes, it is important to note at the outset that when it comes to representing Sri Lanka’s racial cultural and ethnic dynamics Sumathy Sivamohan’s movies tend to occupy fresh grounds. Her movie, Ingirunthu, disrupted narratives that attempted to ‘capture’—and therefore ‘corner’—the upcountry Tamil community into comfortably-numb zones. The accomplished story telling of this movie, primarily achieved through ‘voices’ that offered different layers of articulation from their dug-outs in time, social class and political ideologies, was complemented by bleak isolation that, like an uninvited discarnate spirit, possessed this community—an isolation that defied definition, and sewed the fabric of the film into a collective whole.
In her latest movie, Puththu Saha Piyavaru, Sivamohan’s camera lens undertakes a 360-degree turn to gaze upon itself: it focuses on the crucial aspect of Sinhala film production, specifically the often ignored creative process of memorable melodies that motivate film plots and mesmerize audiences. This movie’s title, Puththu Saha Piyavaru, might resonate with Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, if you as a viewer, dwell too much on one of its thematics that engages the ubiquitous generation gap. But, Sivamohan’s Puththu Saha Piyavaru journeys further into the intangible territory of art in its exploration of music. Like Alfred Prufrock, she poses an ‘overwhelming question’: does music have a race, a communal identity? May be ‘the white man can sing no blues,’; may be ‘heavy metal’ still awaits a coloured Van Halen wielding a Kramer; Maybe -maybe! But Puththu Saha Piyavaru offers a radical take on this question. It attempts to capture the ‘spiritual’ death of music, when music ceases to become an entity driven by its own intrinsic laws; it attempts to articulate the slow painful death of music when the malignant tumor of communal politics sinks its tentacles into its harmonic heart. In this world of trouble, my music pulls me through, sang John Miles—but what happens when ‘trouble’ and ‘music’ become synonyms?
Rex Periyasamy, the movie’s endearing main character, is a talented violinist, studio session artist, and a composer. His humility, simplicity and (deliberate?) ignorance of the identity politics that are shaping the ‘real’ world outside the film studio perhaps magnetize the empathy of the audience towards him. He generously offers his music to the Sinhala movie industry thus nurturing its creative impulse while unknown to him racial consciousness severs the bond between ‘music’ and the ‘musician.’ It is rather an eerie experience to watch Rex living in an ‘island’ amidst the simmering political trauma outside. Even when asked for an opinion about racial consciousness, Rex refuses to get dragged into those nets of view. Simon and Garfunkel sang that “an island never cries,” but could Rex withstand the bonfires of ethnically motivated tension that desperately attempts to drag him into its volcanic heart? Can the fires that consume his personal property also consume his musical heart? Sivamohan skilfully manoeuvres Rex through these minefields of anxiety and uncertainty to expound how music responds to raw sadistic punches from polarized political ideology.
The movie also raises the issue of ‘gratitude’. Rex is one of the representatives of many a talented individual of South Indian origin who helped nurture the Sinhala film industry. Their efforts were appreciated with fire during ethnically-motivated mob violence. The movie articulates this powerful irony by offering the shocking and distressing images of Rex and his family hiding in a swamp, passively watching the flames that engulf their cherished belongings. Rex, the melodious inspiration of Sinhala movies watches his ethnicity being burned away unable to decide where the ‘music’ ends and ‘ethnicity’ begins. A Tamil-speaking film technician is dragged out of his studio by mobs, as he screams out his endeavors of creating movies with Buddhist thematics—possibly an ironic pun on the Buddha’s own suggestion of the scarcity of individuals who pay gratitude.
The film also focuses on this idea of cultural production being a questionable endeavour. Behind the visual impetus of a movie—like the reverse of a Vesak pandal—is a complex bonding of energies defined by competence than communality. Sivamohan disrupts the notion of a ‘pure’ Sinhala movie and tells us that cultural production is a poly-glossic act, a space where artists were artists without divisions and suspicions. When Lakshmi Bai’s patriotic song Pita Deepa Desa—with its characteristic heart-beat mimicking percussion—floods the film theatre, with her voice betraying traces of her minority identity, one cannot help but create a mythical idea around the singer: that Lakshmi Bai could be as effective as a sermonizing monk when it comes to cultural production with the tag ‘Sinhala.’
As the title indicates, the film is not only about the political, but personal as well. Rex has an ambiguous relationship with his son, and this indistinctness helps maintain the individual identities of two musicians separated by generations. While Sumathy skilfully navigates this difficult relationship through tense landscapes, she also explores how ethnic tension travels through time and space and fossilizes into patterns too recognizable. In this scenario perhaps one would be permitted to celebrate—and forgive!—Rex Periyasamy’s notion of being oblivious to those narrow concerns of the world around him. After all, Said says in his essay Musical Retrospection, “music is an art of expression without the capacity to say denotatively and concretely what is being expressed…all music is only about music.”