Sumitra by Sumitra

By Uditha Devapriya

Sumitra Peries turns 87 next week. In a career spanning five decades – or six, if we are to take her stints as assistant director and editor – she made 10 films and four documentaries, overseeing work in numerous other feature and television films made by other directors. The most extraordinary woman of her generation here, Sumitra is also, perhaps, the world’s oldest living active woman director. It is a testament to her indomitable spirit that she hasn’t let go, yet: she remains very much committed to the medium, toying with new ideas, thinking, reflecting, pondering.

In the history of the Sinhala cinema I can think of one or two, maybe three other filmmakers who can stand beside her and with her, but none of them is a woman. Like every other field in this country, the movie industry remains dominated by men. Sumitra’s achievement isn’t just that, as a woman, she put the patriarchy of the field into question; her achievement has been, more importantly, that she has set aside that patriarchy, ignoring it and not letting it get in her way. As director, assistant, and editor, and in academia, she has refused to let gender enter the conversation and obstruct what she wanted to do. Indeed, far from viewing the fact of being a woman as an obstacle, she continues to see it as non-est, a point she highlighted for me in a conversation I had with her long before the pandemic hit: “That men dominated the field when I entered it,” she recalled, “never bothered me.”

A second viewing of her films bears out this curious, one could say even contradictory, attitude. In almost all of them there is an attempt made to emphasise the femininity of the protagonists – it goes without saying that they are all unequivocally and unquestionably women – without succumbing to stereotypes and popular clichés. This refusal to conform to stereotypes has earned Sumitra brickbats from both popular audiences and radical critics, the latter of whom tend to belabour their point that, regardless of them being women, the protagonists in her films embrace defeat too easily. While that allegation may be true of much of her work, it is considered particularly true of her first few efforts, noticeably Gehenu Lamayi and Ganga Addara, in which the woman hero, played in both by Vasanthi Chathurani, either accepts a defeatist attitude or sidesteps it by jumping to her death.

I’d like to point at another instance where this might be especially true. It crops up in a film not often brought up in discussions about her work. In Maya, the protagonist is a little girl who may or may not be a reincarnation of another girl murdered with her mother by an illicit love of the latter. Sumitra’s efforts at eliciting sympathy for the second girl and her mother – played by Swarna Mallawararachchi – come out remarkably as the story progresses. Though we are not made privy to the bickering and squabbling between her and her extended family in the village, we get it that this is a woman who has staked everything for her daughter, who loves her deeply and can only be helpless when she summons the spirit of her previous life. As far as her direction is concerned, Sumitra gives us one of her most remarkable depictions of a woman in her career, one which precedes the most remarkable portrait of a woman she ever drew, also with Swarna as the actress, in Sagara Jalaya.

And yet in contrast to Swarna Mallawarachchi’s contained performance, you have Geetha Kumarasinghe playing the role of the mother of the murdered girl. How Sumitra builds up to the romance between Mrs Kumarasinghe and the man she flirts with (Ravindra Randeniya) while her husband, a professor of sociology at the University of London (Tony Ranasinghe), is abroad, is interesting: the film begins with the daughter reading to the mother a letter she has written for the father, in a scene that highlights domestic felicity and closeness. Once the daughter is out of her way – that is, in school – however, the mother dabbles in her clandestine affair; here, in contrast to the gentle, unostentatious person she was in the earlier scene, she dabs on excessive makeup and is loud, shrill, and boisterous. In the sequence immediately leading to her murder by the other man, she is even more loud and shrill; her boisterous behaviour is what compels that man to deliver the fatal strike.

What are we to make of these contrasts? Writers and critics may argue that in depicting one woman as heroic, self-sacrificing, and ultimately triumphant, she chose to depict the other woman as befitting of sympathy, but also condemnation. Yet it is a testament to Sumitra’s agility that though she directs Mrs Kumarasinghe as John Ford would have directed Maureen O’Hara – carefully lighted, frequently and almost always in close-up, with an emphasis on her beauty – she does her best, and succeeds to a not unremarkable extent, to avoid being judgmental on her.

I believe it was A. J. Gunawardena who observed that the movie’s style – which to me appears almost Brechtian in how it detaches us from the emotional undercurrents of the plot – reminded him a little of William Friedkin. Friedkin, in two films (The French Connection and The Exorcist), managed to keep us hooked on his characters without letting us completely bond with them. This is what Sumitra Peries achieves in Maya, and to her credit, in her portrayal of the two women – urban and rural, sensuous and self-sacrificing, with a husband abroad (and thus absent or metaphorically “dead”) in one case and a husband (actually) dead in the other – she refuses to yield to popular stereotypes.

But perhaps owing to the preferences of the producer or of the actress, such stereotypes come through somewhat, especially in Mrs Kumarasinghe’s performance. In her quest to balance the imperatives of her art with the demands of popular audiences, Sumitra has hence, as Maya shows, tried to realise her conception of the medium in relation to the women in her stories. This is as true of Maya as it was of Ganga Addara and Yahalu Yeheli, both of which had submissive young women contending with their rebellious instincts.

That rift is, I daresay, central to her work, and it is one she manages to shatter in Sagara Jalaya, hands down one of the three or four most perfect films I’ve encountered here.

When it first came out, Sagara Jalaya was instantly recognised for the painstakingly made masterpiece it was and continues to be. Regi Siriwardena’s review, succinct but uncharacteristically short, gushed out in full praise, while Ajith Samaranayake’s review, while questioning the emphasis on the conflict between the two main women in the story that the film gave, heralded it as a great work as well. That it missed the bus to Cannes is a point to be lamented, and regretted; coming in more than nearly three decades after her husband took Rekava there, it may well have brought home the plaudits that Lester’s debut did. That it was made at all, under extraordinary circumstances – the cast and crew had to brave the vagaries of the weather, including the monsoon – in a setting and milieu almost no Sinhala film, at least outside the popular cinema, had ventured into, was an achievement in itself.

To me the overarching achievement of Sagara Jalaya lies in how it signals a shift in Sumitra’s career. In its inimitable blend of emotional resonance and technical competence, the story plays out against a melange of convincing performances, arresting visuals, and breathtaking music. This was the kind of direction the Sinhala cinema had not seen for some time.

More importantly, insofar as her portrayal of the woman at the centre of the story is concerned, Sagara Jalaya symbolises a radical departure from the way Sumitra had seen, or chosen to see, the female in her previous films. This is the sort of woman protagonist the Sinhala cinema could not really conjure: self-sacrificing and brave, yet also assertive and suave. Of particular significance is the way Sumitra conceals the sexual subtext of the plot – which comes out more vividly in Simon Nawagattegama’s short story – beneath the veneer of childhood innocence: right till the end, a word here, a phrase there, gives us a clue to the affair between the woman and her brother-in-law, but like Bindu, the child at the heart of the story, audiences can easily miss it if they don’t strain their ears carefully.

Sumitra tried to regain, and she occasionally succeeded, in replicating the profound success of Sagara Jalaya in her later work. Though in terms of plot, character, and mood there’s nothing much it shares in common with that undisputed masterwork, Loku Duwa comes quite close to emulating it. Sumitra’s sixth film – released eight years after Sagara Jalaya – Loku Duwa epitomises for me a major strength of hers, one that has unfortunately been overlooked by most of her critics: her ability to transform the most mundane literary material into a superior cinematic work.

To be sure, Nawagattegama’s short story does not belong to the ranks of sentimental pot-boilers, but then much of Sumitra’s work has been based on stories which do. Her choice for Loku Duwa – a novel by Edward Mallawaarachchi, who bridges the gap between Karunasena Jayalath and Sujeewa Prasannaarachchi – may have raised eyebrows among certain critics, but the final product is far, far away from the crude sentimentalities of the original text. There are some rather interesting moments in the movie – like the sequence of Gamini Fonseka fingering his cigarette lighter near the Kalutara Bodhiya – which take on a life of their own. Unfortunately, in the annals of her career Loku Duwa has suffered the fate of Sagara Jalaya, in that few people have seen it; every other person I’ve come across prefers to talk about her first efforts, especially Gehenu Lamayi. Yet it stands among her finest work: it is moving, it teems with life, and it flows slowly, gently.

I believe Sumitra Peries’s career has been one big striving towards that kind of cinema. Thus in stark contrast to the emotional histrionics of Duwata Mawaka Misa, which owe more to the cynicism of the original story (by G. B. Senanayake) than to her direction per se, her later works have all attempted to economise, to reduce the emotional undercurrents of the plot to their barest essentials.

There have been times when the original text has imposed certain limits on the final product – as with Yahaluwo, which won plaudits abroad but went by unnoticed in Sri Lanka – but there have been times when, despite the limitations of the source text, she has been able to realise her conception of the medium well. In that sense her greatest work from the recent past has to be Sakman Maluwa. A terse love story that plays off the naiveté of marriage life against the onset of suspicion and jealousy which animates most middle-class romances, it represents Sumitra, I daresay, at her best.

I have seen Sakman Maluwa twice, and the first time around I thought I had passed over an important plot point which could explain the tensions that erupt at the end. Resolving to follow every sequence, I waded through it a second time, eyebrows furrowed and pen and paper in hand. The second viewing was more harrowing than the first: you literally have to read between the shots to spot out the tension. It’s clearly the work of a master craftsman, not merely a competent technician, and it’s the sort which makes clear the boundless potential of a work of art to not only entertain, but also, as Lester Peries once told Philip Cooray, compel the dramatic from the otherwise banal and ordinary.

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com