Through Handagama’s lense

It was over a casual conversation that I had broached the name of Asoka Handagama to a Sri Lankan friend of mine and I still remember the awe on my friend’s face, gaping at me who asked, “have you really seen his films?” followed by a laughter which meant far more than just a facial gesture. I answered, “ I am sorry I haven’t , I have read some reviews but would love to see them” So this article is rather a belated appreciation of the genius of the Sri Lankan New Wave filmmaker, Asoka Handagama, and now perhaps I can read into my friend’s “awe”!

Handagama is breaking fresh grounds to kick-start a bold New Wave film culture bordering on issues of silences and speech, issues which are maybe formally “intimate”, but cannot control its spillovers, here is a director for sure who is throwing up controversy to make minds think, bidding the audience to feel a little uncomfortable in their seats, engulfed in the screen-lit darkness of the movie-theatre.

This article focuses on his three most debated films, prior to making of his Vidhu- what has been hugely circulated as “a family film.”

Handagama embarks on a journey of exploration of desire in all its veritable forms through the three films I will talk about here;- Letter of Fire (Aksharaya), Flying With One Wing (Thani Thatuwen Piyambanna), and This is My Moon (Me Mage Sandai). It is true that all three are independent films addressing completely different issues at stake like, an Oedipal drama, the complexities of a lesbian relationship, and war with its inevitable corollary of the dispossessed. However, all of them have a common thread of desire and sexuality underlying them, where sexuality in its various facets is deployed as a tool to explore the different levels and arenas of desire.

It is this commonality that enables to locate a point of intersection among all the three films. Aksharya, begins with a double framed close shot of ceremonial measuring of the little boy’s body, part by part with a measuring tape held by a pair of feminine hands donning scarlet nails, further accentuating the atmosphere already pregnant with speculative impulses.

The camera gradually reveals the mother measuring time as it has etched itself onto the body of an extended self, setting the melodramatic tone to re-trace a nostalgic past severed from the present by the normative brutality of individualizing the son from the mother, the half brother from the half sister by the physical severing of the umbilical cord. The body in this film gradually becomes a map for lost time as it grows into maturity weaving the matrix to spill the trauma of “an excess”, to reveal the trauma of breaking free from mutual dependence, which formed a harmonious unison.

The double frame and the Western music will gradually bear more significance when the life of the female protagonist and that of a fictitious prostitute from a popular soap opera will meet at the crossroads – one reflecting the other. Remember, the common language of speech is English, hardly they burst into Sinhala, only to speak to characters who belong to the non elitist class, and are more close to the real world, and the matters of the everyday.

Priyaa Ghosh- Kolkata, India

Continued next week