first published in The Island on Friday 23rd May 2008.
RICE PADDY
“US Airborne’s not there to escort
kids to school,” snorts Condoleeza.
“No, not to school,” I counter-snort,
“but to the mortuary freezer.”
From ‘The Krieg
Anthology’ in *Under the Clock-*
* New Poems *by Tony Harrison (2005) Penguin Books
When I saw Thushara Peiris’ *Prabhakaran,* I felt that it is a film worth
seeing, and even writing about. Though the adoption of the name Prabhakaran
seemed a mere advertising gimmick before my viewing of it, it now reveals
itself to me as a well-thought-out choice of a title that gives an ironical
twist to the usual connotations of that name, which are due to its
association with the leader of the most ruthless terror outfit in the world.
That name is quite appropriate for the film in terms of the central concern
of Peiris’ cinematic *tour de force. *Though the description *tour de force
*might seem somewhat of an exaggeration, the fact remains that Peiris , as a
young film-maker, has made a conscientious attempt to artistically
communicate, as best he could, a deeply felt experience through his chosen
medium. My point is that though *Prabhakaran * is obviously not of the
highest quality it displays signs of informed effort on the part of its
author to turn out a good film.
*Prabhakaran *is not at all about the terrorist boss of that name. He is
only a menacing presence in the background, which is occasionally invoked to
exact obedience from those serving him under coercion. The film is based on
an internal division in the terror organization between the bigoted
leadership and the free thinking young disillusioned with its terror
tactics.
Kamalani and her younger brother Prabhakaran are children of ethnically
mixed parentage (father Tamil, mother Sinhalese) . They live in a so-called
border village as members of a mixed community. Having lost their parents in
their childhood to communal violence, they are brought up in an orphanage.
Subsequently, Kamalani secretly joins the LTTE’s suicide squad known as
the Black Tiger Unit. She also gets her brother enlisted in the rebel
movement. She is forced to marry Piyasoma, a young Sinhalese. The terror
outfit tries to use both Prabhakaran and Kamalani in their campaign of
terror through subjecting them to a kind of brainwashing about the
necessity of avenging the murder of their parents. But when they see that it
is poor people like themselves on both sides who get killed in communal
violence, they lose faith in the terror outfit. Despite traumatic memories
from the past, they do not now relish their part in rebel violence from
which, however, they can’t extricate themselves under the circumstances.
Kamalani becomes pregnant. The child inside her and her husband’s love give
her new hope. Prabhakaran, who is a child combatant, rebels against the
repression of the terror group.
Isolated and stranded between their natural human passion for life and love,
freedom and fulfillment on the one hand, and on the other, the relentless
coercion of the terrorists they struggle heroically against their fate in
their own way while events move inexorably to their tragic end.
The drama is unfolded against a rural, jungle setting. The time is the
present time when Tamils, Sinhalese, and others coexist as peaceably as
ever, despite the alleged ethnic conflict raging around them in the name of
which a small section of the population is fighting a terrorist war against
the government. The incidents of violence shown in the film like the killing
of innocent civilians in rebel hold-ups , landmine attacks, night raids on
villages in which sleeping villagers get knifed, and other similar outrages
are plausible reconstructions of cases often heard about.
The people are unsophisticated rural peasants who bear the brunt of these
terrorist attacks. These people care little about race distinctions among
them. They eke out a meager living in unenviable circumstances, but still
live a life of sharing and caring. When an elderly man among a group of
villagers including the seven month pregnant Kamalani riding in the open
back of a tractor jolting along a rough road, urges the driver to drive
slowly saying, “Otherwise Piyasoma’s wife will give birth to her baby here
and now!” (The feeling of intimacy and camaraderie of his plain, perfectly
explicit, unedited, colloquial Sinhalese does not come out in this clumsy
English rendering), he expresses their collective concern for her comfort
and wellbeing.
The jungle-covered, isolated, primitive rural setting is appropriate for the
depiction of the most fundamental human instincts of fellow feeling, trust,
and sympathy that are being violated by terrorism. The jungle setting suits
the rare atavistic nature of such violation of norms of civilized conduct.
Besides, it is the very jungle terrain where the terrorist violence in
question is actually taking place.
Terrorism sows suspicion among neighbours setting them against one another.
What could be a more telling expression of this than Piyasoma’s casual
remark to Kamalani, while bathing in the tank about his apprehensions
concerning her: “Who knows if you are secretly helping the terrorists”? It
is inconceivable that Piyasoma of all people suspects Kamalani of
involvement in the terrorist movement. But his ingenuous, childish words
betray the deep, insidious mistrust of one community by another that is
inevitably generated at a time of turmoil.
It is not only the social fabric that terrorism threatens. While vitiating
the social atmosphere it turns innocents into killers. Prabhakaran kills
civilians in cold blood because he is forced to do so by the terror outfit
whose prisoner he is. Kamalani also kills, but for a different reason. Her
act of killing Abe, who has been stalking her despite her attachment and
marriage to Piyasoma (who, unaware of the man’s secret passion for his wife,
still treats him as a trusted friend), always lurking in the background, is
something she is compelled to do by Abe’s thoughtless, self-centred pursuit
of her attentions merely because of his own infatuation with her. It proves
her absolute devotion to Piyasoma. It is also an indication of the intensity
of her suffering on account of her having to conceal from her husband her
involvement with the terrorists, because it is nothing less than a betrayal
of his trust in her. Abe’s murder removes any lurking suspicion in us
that Kamalani’s chafing at the LTTE demand for her undertaking of a suicide
mission is due to her tenderness or cowardice, or that she is capable of
betrayal of a cause that she could genuinely pledge allegiance to. She kills
Abe because her loyalty to her husband is total; she can’t stand anyone who
belittles or tries to call her devotion to him into question. It
demonstrates that if she was truly committed to the terrorist cause she
would not fail to serve that cause faithfully. The same goes for
Prabhakaran. Therefore the rejection of the terrorist campaign by both of
them is because of their unwavering loyalty to the truly meaningful values
of humanity, love and respect for life.
For Kamalani and Piyasoma her pregnancy is the natural fruition of their
love. But when she pleads with her handler or commander in the rebel
organization that she be allowed to give birth to her child before the
accomplishment of her mission, he reminds her of the fact that it was their
stratagem to have her made pregnant for use as a suicide bomber in their
terrorist scheme (her pregnancy would save her being searched by security
personnel, which would facilitate her access to her target), and tells her
not to worry about the unborn child.
What is more natural than the birth of new life? What is more unnaturally
cruel than a terrorism that uses a pregnant woman as a human bomb to
massacre innocents?
The image of the expectant woman present from the beginning to the end of
the film is a central symbol in this film. Her survival at the end of the
movie strikes a positive note. Kamalani is made to turn tables (by fate or
some mysterious process of natural justice) on her tormentors by
inadvertently blowing them up with a time-bomb that they have meant for her
(delivered to her hidden in a bag supposed to be that of her dead brother);
she walks home thus miraculously saved from the deadly treachery of her
handlers. The important thing is that Kamalani has survived all the chaos so
far, and that her survival holds out some hope for the future.
Any artistic creation is a fusion of art and artifice. A film is no
exception. But film, in comparison with other forms of art, which have
existed for hundreds or even thousands of years, is of relatively recent
origin, and hence naturally utilizes elements derived from those older
modes. Film borrows from painting, plastic arts, photography, drama,
fiction, poetry, and music, etc. This makes cinema an unusually complex, an
unusually powerful artistic medium. Basically, of course, a film is a piece
of visual art that depends on images, and that usually taps the resources of
language and music.
It is the film-maker’s business to blend all these elements into an
effective vehicle for the conveyance of his or her innermost responses to
striking experiences real or imaginary that excite our aesthetic sense. A
good film like any other good work of art engages the connoisseurs’ critical
imagination for the reward of an apprehension of beauty in its
contemplation, and a deepening of insight into an aspect of human
experience.
*Prabhakaran * is an attempt in this direction. The ancient Latin poet
Horace (65-08 BCE) held that the worth of a work of art could be gauged in
terms of two criteria: an artistic work is of value if it ‘*pleases’* and ‘*
instructs*’. In my opinion Thushara Peiris’ film fulfills these criteria.
Some critics may tend to see it as mere anti-LTTE propaganda. My own view is
that the film’s real focus is not the LTTE. It is not a critique of the LTTE
cause. The LTTE campaign of terror is presented from the point of view of
its direct victims represented by Prabhakaran the child soldier, and his
sister Kamalani. The separatist cause – the oft repeated “a country for
ourselves” - is simply a threadbare, vacuous slogan for these victims, like
the soundless lip movements of the rebel commander in the film. What the
viewers of the film, through its artistic devices, are made to emotionally
experience is the tragedy of the needless dehumanization and destruction of
blooming youth in the name of a single deranged megalomaniac’s dreams of
imperial domination.
The nature of our aesthetic sense is such that though the theme is bleak our
sensitive response to its artistic presentation ‘delights’ us. At the same
time the contemplation of the common humanity of the terrorists, and their
victims (with whom we identify ourselves as vicarious sufferers) is a
sobering thought for us.
A literary text – be it a poem like Homer’s epic *Iliad, *T.S. Eliot’s *The
Waste Land, *Tony Harrison’s *Under the Clock* (from which my epigraph to
this review comes), or a prose work like Joseph Conrad’s novel *Heart of
Darkness* – uses the resources of human language, mainly in the form of
words that refer to things in the world of human experience; but a film
principally relies on the arrangement of images on a screen which
reconstructs situations in the same domain. In both cases the creative
artist’s role is the same: shaping out of his or her raw materials (words
and images) an object of beauty – i.e. a finished poem/story/drama or a film
for the contemplation and enjoyment of the aesthetes (at whatever level of
sophistication they are capable of reaching).
Thushara Peiris has been conscious of this in the making of
*Prabhakaran. *Though
I don’t think that I am competent enough to talk about the cinematographic
aspect of film-making the shooting of the various scenes of this film has
been attended to with care to highlight the really significant aspect of
each shot. For example, we may consider the various shots of Kamalani
waiting for her rendezvous with terror activists in the jungle. In one she
stands under a large tree, and soliloquizes (Soliloquy is a device borrowed
from drama that is used to reveal to the audience the innermost thoughts
that pass through the mind of a character). This image of Kamalani, among
other things, shows her smallness (vis-à-vis the huge issues she is
confronting), and her isolation in a vast world of private misery. In
another shot she is shown hiding in the hollow of a tree; she is
unpleasantly surprised by the sudden appearance of the person from the rebel
organization that she has been waiting for, and she tells him how frightened
she is. The talk of fear irks the man. Her ingratiating attempt to make it a
bit amusing is pathetic: “You frightened even the one inside me”. The night
raid on the sleeping village is another effective shot. Flickering points of
light dancing in pitch darkness orchestrated by sounds of shouting and
wailing actualize the numbing fear and terror of that experience for those
who have only heard or read about such atrocities.
There are other signs of the film-maker’s commitment to cinema as art. The
use of symbolism is one. Trees, water, the moon, light, darkness, and many
other details assume symbolic significance, which does not escape the
average discerning viewer’s notice. The film also uses such devices as the
flashback technique, contrasts, parallels, and juxtaposition in its
narration in order to highlight the relevant themes. All these invite the
creative engagement of the audience with what is projected onto the screen
by the director.
My ‘reading’ of the film is that it is mainly a criticism of the use of
children by the terror organization. Even when Kamalani’s self-immolation is
demanded, the equally pitiable but more outrageously exploited victim is
the unborn child (because, if it is merely a young woman they need for the
mission, any other young woman would do; but here Kamalani qualifies for the
mission because her pregnancy is an essential part of the camouflage, so
diabolically planned by terror agents).
To the terrorists children count for nothing except as conscripts. When they
get killed in clashes with the army, they are shown to the world as
innocent school children massacred by the army, not as heroic fighters who
have laid down their lives for a cause (even though they did so under
duress). That is, the terrorists exploit them even after their death for
propaganda purposes. So in my view, what is being held up for our
condemnation is not any identifiable political cause (right or wrong), but
the terrorists’ sacrifice of children on the altar of some political
ideology.
The young boy and the young woman playing the two central roles of
Prabhakaran and Kamalani respectively do a commendable job by bringing these
two characters alive for the film-goers in a convincing manner.
Therefore watching *Prabhakaran *should be a rewarding experience to many.
*Rohana R. Wasala *
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