Through Handagama’s lens

Continued from August 15

Priyaa Ghosh

What happens in the household within the huge colonial bungalow of the retired chief justice, is a constant repetition of the past of a lost moment and a lost time, which has entered into a mode of perpetual stasis, symbolically through the indefinable sexual impotence of the master of the house. What remains of the trauma is imposed on his daughter/wife (born of the maid) who is stifled towards insanity with her nonnegotiable trauma, guilt, sexual desire, crises in her own identity, and finally in performing the role of a magistrate, sorting out the strengths of the discourses of public ethics an maternal morality.

The trauma of a colonial past, a fractured journey into modernity looms large and as if doomed to the madness of the body and the desire. Aksharya is a film about a desire to re-live and undo the ravages of time. The bursting libidinal desire of the mother and her indignation suddenly exposes itself in an odd space of the museum, surrounded by dead objects trapped in their historical time.

Vidu

So is her body which suddenly breaks free from the stasis. Sometimes this film reminded me of Truffaut’s 400 Blows, where Antoine being unable to communicate with his parents at home, plays pranks with his friend like looking at pictures of pin-up girls, exploring the music of Parisian city life, and finally being punished, which he longs to escape. Here too they indulge in an adventure of similar order, and it finally culminates in an accidental death of a prostitute. It is only that the little boy here doesn’t try to escape to the sea, he finally flees after he unknowingly stabs his own mother (a play on the Oedipal drama, instead of stabbing the father, it is the mother, since the father is already dead, and perhaps nom du pere has lost its symbolic value).

The death of the prostitute in the soap opera and the death of the mother lead one to the other, juxtaposing the real and the fictional temporalities of the narrative in the film and that of the mise-en abyme, opening up the rites of passage from a colonial hangover, a moment of limbo, to a moment inscribed in a spatio-temporal matrix of parallel modernities.

Handagama embarks on using the female body as a site of gender politics, as a site that exposes the crises in the politics of “othering”, emanating from a phallocentric discourse, thereby revealing a plethora of other debates in relation to the peripheral or marginal status within the dominant discourse of the society. Ethnic conflicts, military aggressions, identity crises and issues of the legitimate and the illegitimate, the trauma of overcoming a colonial past, and the attempts at reframing modernity in the light of ethics over morality.

The fractured and mutually contested tensions of these binaries become starkly visible in the contexts of all the three films I am referring to but most strongly in Letter of Fire and Flying with One Wing. Handagama in an interview had explained his choice of the English title for Aksharya as something which is unnameable, drawing on a Derridian philosophy. In its effect, the unnameable breaks free from the semantic chain of signifiers, at the very moment of trying to crystallize it within the limits of representation against the normative tendencies in being contextualized within any discursive practices. All the narratives of relationship, of bonding, as they develop through the three films, borders on a perpetual flux, defining and redefining them throughout the films vis a vis the men/male concerned, none can be named in relation to the mainstream or the normativity of kinship ties. It is the uncertainties, the confusion, the inabilities that run the subtext of a negotiation with a narrative of simultaneous modernity, which is ethnic by virtue of being hybridized and not super imposed.

The confusion remains at the level of how the characters negotiate their way through such forces and pressures, and how they ultimately come to terms with their identities and their selves. The mother in Aksharya, construes herself, her femininity in relation to her son, the lesbian “husband” in Flying with One Wing, construes herself as a man in relation to the dominant performativity of the phallic order, the Tamil woman in This is My Moon situates herself in relation to the dominant ideology of male desire, the “masculinity” of the soldier.

Opening up into a world of grim comedy, of indecision, of boredom, of despair, and a strain of coldness, Handagama’s camera explores the ethnic war between the Sinhalese and the Tamils to the background score of ethnic music, harping on a mellifluous note of loss, apprehension and melancholia on a mélange of string instruments. While exposing the tragic pathos of cheated youth, and the conflicts between a ethnic-nationalist necessity of the war, and a human necessity of peace and reconciliation, This is My Moon, opens up a series of diverse questions, maybe all with a feminist edge. At this point I must mention that Feminism as I mean it here is not in any activist parlance, but as a philosophy that vindicates the rights of any and every socially segregated group demarcated in theory and practice as the “other”.

In Flying with One Wing, and Letter of Fire, the community looks like as if in a state of lull, and anticipation like the protagonists in Fellini’s films like Amarcord, or I Vittelloni. There are changes on the cards but the time is too far away.

This is My Moon, uses female sexuality as a weapon or a lure to preserve the desiring self. When the Tamil women jumps into the bunker of a Sinhalese soldier, who is confused whether or not he must pull the trigger, finally relinquishes the feigned military spirit, as he is wooed by the helpless self surrender of the Tamil girl, who literally invites him to rape her in exchange of her life. The struggle at this point for her is to live, the same gesture is repeated in front of a bookie when the army comes to take her to a refugee camp.

The question is who legitimizes rape as a weapon in war?, is it the war mongers or the people themselves in their natural instinct to live, is a question that Handagama poses to his viewers, and therefore who controls the sexuality?, is it the high priests of patriarchy or its victims whom it wants to subjugate; are not the tools being overturned, causing us to think again the renewed notions of the self vis a vis the dominant notions sexuality, of resistance, defiance and surrender, This film starts with a very simple desire, that is to live even at the cost of self abnegation – but this eventuates into a desire to “become”, by being someone who bears her own agency, and is her own interlocutor.

Flying With One Wing use sexual deviance as a possible tool for freedom from gender politics, a sense of crippledness, a sense of mobility despite shortcomings is what is captured by its title, but the question is what decides this crippledness?

To be Continued