Ammawarunay: The last temptation of LJP

Carlo Fonseka

CINEMA: At age 87, Lester James Peries, universally honoured as one of the greatest living film makers, has succumbed to the temptation to make another film, his 21st. At its premiere at the Regal Cinema on 30 December 2006, he announced that Ammawarunay (Elegy for a Mother, as the film brochure calls it) would be his last film.

He pleaded physical incapacity, implying that although his spirit is willing, his flesh is weak. If I remember right, in one of George Bernad Shaw’s plays, a young man concerned to ascertain the age at which the human animal ceases to be plagued by temptations of the flesh, seeks the answer from his 90 year-old grandmother.

She says that she still doesn’t know. I happen to believe that greater temptation hath no man than LJP’s to make films. So we who love the Father of Sinhala Cinema, should hopefully and respectfully say of LJP what Shakespeare said in a Sonnet:

“When my love swears that she is made of truth I do believe her, though I know she lies”.

Way out

However that might be, I think there is a way out of LJP’s putative physical incapacity to make films. Since films, like wars, begin in the minds of men, I suggest that LJP’s next film should be made entirely in his fertile mind.

After all, if theoretical physicists can apprehend the nature of physical reality by thought-experiments, there is no reason why LJP cannot explore the intricacies of human relationships in the brilliant studio of his mind.

Moreover, his cinema idol, who films joined to him, the unvaryingly constant, extremely able and, ever willing Sumithra, is there to translate his thought films into celluloid.

To clinch my plea I will quote an authority LJP is in conscience bound to accept: “... a man shall leave his father and mother, and be made one with his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”

So his flesh cannot be weak. Therefore, Ammawarunay cannot and must not be his last film. With those valedictory thoughts off my chest, let me now focus on the film itself.

The film

A moment ago I remarked that like wars, films begin in the minds of men. The allusion was to the famous sentence that occurs in the preamble to the Constitution of UNESCO, which was established as a UN agency in 1946.

It goes like this: “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.” In my perception, Ammawarunay is a film about war and peace.

War is explicit and sanctimoniously endorsed; peace is implicit and humanely urged. So this film is one that seeks to build the defences of peace in the minds of those who will see it.

Ammawarunay is vintage LJP. The frames of the film tell the story of the ravages of war, however justified the war may be. Its hidden agenda is LJP’s beatific vision: peace in his motherland in his time.

It seems to me that the title of the film Ammawarunay is a metaphor for Mother Lanka symbolizing as she does the sum total of mothers in the country, destined by Nature to ensure the continuity of the most precious thing on earth: Human Life. And precious human life is what war pitilessly destroys.

The lead role in Ammawarunay is played by Malini Fonseka, surely our best actress. In this film she reaches the transcendent pinnacle of her career and gives a performance of surpassing emotional intensity. At several points she brought tears to my eyes and - as I couldn’t help perceiving at the premiere show - even to her own eyes, as she watched the film.

Theme

We are living through a tragic war, generated and sustained by blood-thirsty men of ill-will greedy for personal power. Moviegoers cannot stop wars. Nor can moviemakers for that matter.

But Dr. Lester James Peries knows that what cannot be cured must be endured and that a catharsis of our emotions is the only symptomatic therapy to be prescribed. That therapy Ammawarunay gave me. I warmly recommend it to others.

The theme of Ammawarunay is the heart and soul of LJP’s cinematic art. It is his conviction that the most altruistic of all human bonds is a mother’s love for her children.

This is the unlimited, self-giving compassionate love that the Buddha spoke of when he said: “Just as with the sacrifice of her own life, a mother shields from hurt her own, her only child, let all-embracing thoughts for all that lives be thine”.

In Ammawarunay the mother’s love for her children is so intense that when she sees them suffering from the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”, her response is a desperate one.

Her brain - the organ that Nature has given her to survive. in this world - switches to the mode which puts her out of touch with reality. To be out of touch with reality is nothing else but to be mad. Thus, the tragedies her children have to endure drive her mad.

When we try to find out the source of her madness we find that it is traceable to the war that is raging in this Buddhist land. It is raging in the teeth of the fact that Buddhism does not recognize even the concept of a just war.

Irony

LJP and Somaweera Senanayake are jointly credited with the story of Ammawarunay. Somaweera Senanayake is responsible for the screenplay, which permeates the film through and through with the Buddhist ethos, the bedrock of Sinhala Culture.

The irony of all this is that the creator of the film LJP remains an out and out Roman Catholic. His first film Rekhawa (1956) which purports to portray life in a typical Sinhala village was conspicuously devoid of any trace of Buddhism.

He was rightly chastised by critics for this grave and glaring omission. Ammawarunay, on the contrary, is conspicuously devoid of reference to all other religions, except for one throw-away-line put into the mouth of an insignificant character in the film (Sanath Gunatilleka). He happens to be the doctor in charge of the rural hospital.

Just before leaving the village on a mercy mission to a conflict area, he informs the Chief Priest of the village temple that even non-Buddhists will receive relief! (At this point in the film I burst out laughing; to my utter embarrassment nobody else did).

Life is about human relationship and Ammawarunay is a film that sensitively explores the relationships between a widowed mother and her two adult sons and daughter. Unsurprisingly, in a film with the title Ammawarunay the mother (Malini Fonseka) is the supremely dominant character.

Her elder son (Pradeep Dharmadasa) is a young Buddhist priest professionally committed to cultivate detachment, but manifestly succeeding only in becoming physically non-attached to the family.

The daughter (Gayani Gisanthika) in a moment of indiscretion had married a quintessential male chauvinist pig (persuasively portrayed by Asoka de Zoysa) who is good for nothing except for the practice of mumbo-jumbo bordering on fraud.

The younger son (Roshan Pilapitiya) joins the fighting army to escape from the army of unemployed disaffected youth. The mother accepts the elder son’s religious vocation with equanimity, if not with the serene joy of the pious.

But she unconditionally rejects her younger son’s joining the army. When she turns to the Chief Buddhist Priest in the village for guidance, the advice she receives is more in line with religion as a survival strategy of a tribe, than it is in consonance with the teachings of the Compassionate Buddha. (Incidentally, the Chief Priest’s role is played to perfection by Tissa Abeysekara.

Roles

In real life Tissa is a multi-talented, many splendored personality. The only thing I remember of the film Veera Puran Appu is Tissa’s portrayal of Kuda Pola Himi. He plays his role in Ammawarunay with such consummate brilliance that I felt my much-married friend had missed his true vocation)

The film tracks down the vicissitudes in the lives of the five members of the family (mother, three children, and son-in-law) with sensitivity and human understanding. To achieve maximum effect it deploys state of the art photography, editing and other technical skills of the cinema.

Premasiri Khemadasa directs the music in the film unobtrusively with a perfect understanding of its function. Pandit Amaradewa’s Buddhist chant gives the film a touch of meditative gravity.

All of these add up to make Ammawarunay an enthralling cinematic experience. Two take-home messages linger in my mind. One is that when all is said and done dukkha is a fundamental fact of existence. The other is that war is hell.

Anti-war

It is difficult to avoid sensing that Ammawarunay is an anti-war film. When our country is going through a phase of war mania in the literal sense, it requires an artiste with exceptional creative intelligence to make a film with the merits of Ammawarunay.

On the face of it the film, through the mouth of a Chief Buddhist Priest, endorses the practical necessity for able-bodied young men to fight, and if need be, to die for the good of the tribe.

One comes away from the film, however, abhorring war. One is reminded of the words of the American General William T Sherman uttered in 1880: “There’s many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is hell”. Ammawarunay demonstrates the reason why it is so. War is hell because it drives mad the mothers of boys.

Ammawarunay is a film about war and peace. So is Leo Tolstoy’s famous novel War and Peace. Those who have gone to the trouble of counting say that in Tolstoy’s War and Peace there are something like 500 characters.

In LJP’s film on war and peace there are only 11. In Tolstoy’s War and Peace the vicissitudes of the members of 4 aristocratic families are laboriously documented. LJP’s film on war and peace explores the lives of just 5 people of one poor, humble family.

Yet, perhaps because I am more ‘cinemate’ than literate, the emotional impact on me of LJP’s film was much more profound than the impact of the novel regarded by discerning critics as the greatest novel ever written. You may think me a philistine for saying so. But that is the truth.

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