Guerilla Marketing

a packet of themes on social sleaze

Reviewed by Namel Weeramuni

Jayantha Chandrasiri’s, Guerilla Marketing pours a powerful message down the throat of the nation, and that decanters through well.

The Theatre incarcerates the audience into darkness, and the screen comes into life with a traditional drumming session of a son and father, both bare bodied, followed by Guerilla Marketing convention opening its wings for action in a jungle in the night amongst a merry making crowd in the midst of an armed force of schemers delivering its strategy to architecture an election campaign.

Thisara the genius creator of an effective marketing campaign is used by Gregory Maha Adikaram in his presidential electoral campaign. Thisara creates a rumour factory to take root throughout the lengths and breadth of the country vouching for Maha Adikaram’s suitability and efficacy to head the nation.

The scheme works very well in favour of Maha Adikaram and he becomes the President. However, the architect of his success, Thisara overcome with guilt succumbs to his schizophrenic pre-disposition and ends up in an asylum. Jayantha uses Thisara’s schizophrenic state as a symbol.

This is quite obvious by the surrounding docile inmates that the film maker introduces in the asylum scenes symbolizing them as subjects of a disillusioned nation, fighting in their own fantasy world against the ones whom they have brought into power. In their subliminal world they experience the failures of the elected, and they are now driven out of their expectations.

It also depicts the clash of the “sane” world with the “insane world”. This becomes clear when Rangi as a sane person calls for help and Thisara wraps himself in the shroud of his own insanity indicating the detachment of the two worlds. Similarly, Jayantha signals, unless the shady political world opens up itself to sanity it can close its own political crematorium and light the match.

The title of the movie splendidly reveals our position in present day society. The whole country is a market for bigotry and corruption. It is a market that has been invented for survival of the few, - the custodians of the nation. The irony is that it is the populace itself that bestows this custodianship to the few.

Such populace of the whole country becomes sick by the actions of the custodians. Sick as a result of delusion caused by deceit and misdirection of the custodians. The king-makers become victims and kings, the oppressors. The whole society goes into a state of anguish, with Thisara personifying this anguish. This is what Jayantha depicts in his very cleverly crafted film.

Two-way symbol

Thisara is a two-way symbol. He is a genius on the one hand and on the other a fallen prey to madness. The film implies how politicians abuse societally weak minds through gossip, and how by spending huge sums of money on propaganda they exploit the talents of intellectuals, and in turn how they become pawns for unethical self-cantered politicians driving frantically for power.

Gregory Maha Adikaram in the film is such a ruthless politician whose sole craving and ambition is to creep to the top by hook or by crook. This is clearly indicated at one point when he states that politicians labour themselves only to win a general election, whereas statesmen steer and devote themselves for the benefit of the future generations.

Maha Adikaram toils only for the upcoming election representing how the present day state of the political machinery operates in this country. Chandrasiri does not tell us this in a harsh, raw, or in an immature manner, but clearly in artistic terms using technically advanced rhythms of cinematic frames. His technique is effective, suggestive and highly restrained. This is how he establishes his proficiency of originality as an artistic director.

Of the many layers of themes, I see two major ones. One is at a national level, the other on a very personal level. The former is political, the latter a living, bounded by love and jealousy. Both levels compliment each other, to and fro. Both stand at par. The conveyance of both messages to the audience is equally important in the eyes of the director.

He looks at politics as a menace to the personal. Involvement in politics kills individualism converting it again into a subversive collectivism. It is this subversive collectivism that symbolizes the inmates headed by Thisara in the asylum. They are the ones who suffer, and are the ones affected in the collectivism. It is the price of politics of those involved in it.

This is what punches the individual in society. This is exactly how Thisara as an individual experiences and becomes a victim of the circumstances. It is this dilemma of the individual that Jayantha Chandrasiri drives home in a very truth-seeking undertone through his creation.

Dilemma

Jayantha’s total concentration is directed on Thisara’s dilemma as a person caught in between two worlds - past and the present, his personal relationship with his wife, and his past girl friend. He lives in the past and works in the present, and his present is his past.

This is clear in his mind when the reflections of the past mirror in him even when he is rolling over on to the opposite side on bed besides his jealous, possessive wife, Rangi, (Sangeetha Weerarathna) after returning from the mental hospital. He is guarded by the love and sympathy of his first adored, his cousin, (Yasodha Wimaladharma).

He lives with those sentiments when he finds he is away from politics. These feelings derive from tradition, symbolically represented by the play of drums by his cousin as watched and guided by his uncle, (Ranganath) as the film reaches its climactic end, unlike at the very start the playing was in the hands of his uncle, institute his thoughts on the past.

The introduction of drum beats at the start and at the end embraces the established societal order and its harmony on the continuation of tradition, and on honest adherence to it within the social structure that we live in without corrupting it. Who corrupts it? The dishonest self-absorbed politicians!

Whilst Premasiri Khemadasa’s creative and dramatized music score encompasses the flow of the film to its intensification, the casts’ accomplished performance as a whole flexes the theme effectively forcing it in the minds of the viewers. Kamal Addararachchi’s portrayal as Thisara is complex, subtle and insightful. Jackson Anthony as Gregory Maha Adikaram is crafty, impressive, dominant and forceful.

culturally unspoiled

Yasodha Wimaladharma as Suramya is caring, understanding, forgiving, pleasing innocent, inspiring, culturally unspoiled and unsophisticated maintaining the traditional milieu in spite of her Western education, notwithstanding the latter quality being forced on us to believe. This could have been altered had the costume designer took care of it.

Sangeetha Weeraratne as Rangi is quick-witted, aggressive, jealous, possessive, and yet remissive. All of them become good clay under the innovative directorial liquefying of Jayantha Chandrasiri for a very interesting film.

Guerilla Marketing has shades of Western film technicality and editing. It helps to keep the tempo and involvement in it as an experience. It’s a film that all cinema lovers must see.

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