Sat Mag
The demons of the past:
“Paangshu”
By Uditha Devapriya
How Baba Nona sees her son, for what he is and what he does, drives much of the drama in Paangshu. Visakesa Chandrasekaram, the director, doesn’t let us into what she’s thinking at once. But there are clues lingering beneath the surface. Through them we gather that she vacillates between her intense love for him, and her disapproval of his activism. And yet she doesn’t really condemn much less discourage him; at one point, reflecting on the past, she confesses that she was helpless to stop him.
Because this dominates the narrative so profoundly, Visakesa doesn’t let the other elements of the plot take over. Hence there aren’t any drawn-out sequences of her pursuing the men who took away her son: right after he’s kidnapped by a paramilitary squad one night, we get to the courthouse years later when she identifies a member of that squad, a soldier. There is also no mystery about his fate: at the police station Baba Nona pleads with an officer to let her see her son, and while the officer denies that they have him, the camera moves back to reveal that he is, indeed, there; bloodied, bruised, and blindfolded after an interrogation, his torturer pointing a gun at him, lest he try to speak through the gag in his mouth.
The drama, in other words, grows out of her responses to the world around her, including the soldier, his wife, the tuition master who befriends the son and convinces him to help him spread anti-government propaganda, and wealthier villagers who, while sympathising with Baba Nona, stays quiet about her son’s activities. The story doesn’t just depend on one performance. It literally moves and flows with it.
Paangshu is the best film based on the second JVP uprising I’ve seen so far, and I say this as someone who critically admired Anuruddha Jayasinghe’s Ginnen Upan Seethala when it first came out. Even in that film, the violence, the human dimension, came up in pianissimos: we became so engrossed with the lives of the men who founded the movement which led the uprising that we simply didn’t have time to dwell on how those led by them ended up dying in prison. Not surprisingly, I left Ginnen Upan Seethala a little dissatisfied, even frustrated; there’s so much to tell about this era, so much from both sides, and Jayasinghe’s version of events, great as it was, relegated them all to the background.
Visakesa doesn’t let them remain in the background; he brings them to the fore. Though he doesn’t pretend at a faithful reconstruction of that period, he takes great effort to recreate the sense of despair, of futility, which lingered on in the minds of all those affected by that period. For tragedy, as a friend of mine who lived through the insurrection once told me, was inescapable then. It was a fact: you acknowledged it, or you didn’t, but it affected you all the same. Everyone had to take a side, and those who didn’t had their fates determined by the side they seemed to take right before they were killed, or made to disappear. As with history, so with the movie: the characters in Paangshu have all unequivocally taken sides in the past. But the past is what was, and the present, when they reflect on what they did or did not do, is what they must move on to. In Baba Nona’s quest, Visakesa tells us about the journey of one such person who tries, fails, and succeeds, in moving on.
Thus Baba Nona isn’t just cast in the stereotypical mould of a mother searching for a missing son, detached from the world around her. She’s very much a part of the village, and as much a member of her community. When she consults a Buddhist priest on her son’s horoscope to get to know where he is now, for instance, he brushes her aside: why bother telling the future of Che Guevara type revolutionaries and murderers? Yet moments earlier, a wealthy villager whose daughter had been killed by those revolutionaries had expressed concerns about her granddaughter, now on the cusp of puberty, growing up without a mother. The monk had consoled her: she’ll grow up just fine, he had told her.
A low caste washerwoman, Baba Nona doesn’t try to defy these codes and taboos. And to be fair, the director doesn’t make it out that she’s being persecuted because of her status or of her son taking up arms against the establishment either. Indeed that wealthy matriarch, played with characteristic weariness by Grace Ariyawimal, invites Baba Nona to her house on more than one occasion. While she’s treated less as a guest to be entertained than a servant to be tolerated, they are not unkind to her. After the granddaughter goes through her coming of age, they share a moment in her room together: the little girl tells her of her mother, a contestant at the 1989 parliamentary election from Vijaya Kumaratunga’s party, and Baba Nona tells her of the night she was killed. It’s an otherwise trivial moment, but to me it’s also one of the most illuminating: it reveals their shared sorrow.
Paangshu is about the pain of waiting for justice, and the cool indifference of those who try to ensure that justice comes out. The only other character who becomes more than a prop on Baba Nona’s side, then, is her lawyer, played here by Jagath Manuwarna. Manuwarna’s intentions are inscrutable and hard to grasp: does he want Baba Nona to find her son, or does he want to bask in the glory of his practice? Visakesa doesn’t provide us with the answer, though as he once told an interviewer, his disenchantment with his profession – for he too studied law – was what partly encouraged him to direct the film.
Manuwarna, at any rate, wants to win the case, and does everything to pin the soldier to the wall. But there’s a sequence where after much consideration, the mother changes her mind. The lawyer is furious: he did everything he could to get her son’s torturer to prison, and here she is refusing to let him proceed. She stares on, reiterating her decision. He begs her. She refuses. Then he shouts at her to leave. She leaves. Defeated, furious, Manuwarna stares at her walking away. The relationship between these two make up for very little in the plot, but it forms its bedrock. To see these two interact is to see through the surface of the story. At times it is hard to watch, and at others, edifying.
Which is what you could say of the whole film. Malinda Seneviratne once remembered the tears in his eyes as he heard the news, from far, far away, of Rohana Wijeweera’s capture and murder. He was hardly sympathetic to the neo-fascism of the JVP, even less so the neo-fascism of the government. And yet, despite my lack of sympathy for those from both sides who let a whole country bleed, those tears came back to me as I sat through the end credits of Ginnen Upan Seethala, at the names of those killed flashing on the screen. I couldn’t help it then, and as I saw Baba Nona searching for her son, I couldn’t help it now.
Not all viewers would share that sentiment. In fact one of the most frequently invoked criticisms of the film has been that it fails to rise above its material and offer an analysis of why the second insurrection took place. Speaking to Meera Srinivasan of The Hindu, for instance, ex-JVP MP Bimal Ratnayake, admitting that his party has to confront the demons of its past, argued that “while the film tells the story of an individual, it doesn’t capture the ‘true nature’ of the struggle or the socio-political context that led to it.”
This, of course, is to demand of a work of art the criterion one would normally use for a documentary. And yet, misplaced as Ratnayake’s critique may be in the context of the film, it does shed light on the unwillingness of most critics to examine the “true nature” of the insurrection in their reviews; all of them barring none, for instance, seem to have been able to recall that hundreds of thousands of mothers like Baba Nona lost their children to government and government allied anti-JVP Marxist squads without as much as a flicker or a frown from Colombo’s self-proclaimed NGO and journalist gatekeepers, a phenomenon that Susantha Goonetilake has comprehensively covered in his book, Recolonisation. However, that is a different kettle of fish, one which I hope to explore in another essay. The subject of this piece, meanwhile, is the film, not the history underlying it.
As the plot unfurls, Baba Nona becomes more than just the protagonist or the centrepiece. She becomes the plot. That tells a lot, obviously, about the performance. Nita Fernando does her best to capture the weariness and the indomitable spirit her character would have embodied. The result is the finest performance she’s ever given; even finer, I should think, than that of the widow in Prasanna Vithanage’s Pawuru Walalu.
Nita, in her performance, revels as much in what she reveals as in what she does not. We see that nearly everyone – even her kindly neighbours and her nephew (Xavier Kanishka) – treat her as a simpleton, a woman incapable of resolve or decisiveness. The triumph of her playing hence comes out at the end, when, in a flashback, she reveals to the tuition master who got her son involved in anti-government activities how she tied up the story’s last loose end. It is here that we encounter her true face, the resolve and the decisiveness she was capable of, which she had hidden from all those around her.
It’s only fitting that the story ends there, literally after she Baba Nona looks at her son and swims across the screen. If Paangshu was about how at what became of him, after all, it can only finish at the point when she confronts her demons, and lets them rest.
In that sense Nita’s performance reminds me, somewhat, of Joe Abeywickrema’s performance as Vannihamy in Purahanda Kaluwara. Like Vannihamy, Baba Nona refuses to accept the official version of things, and persists with her belief that her son is still alive. Like Vannihamy, she seems credulous, naive, an elderly figure who exists to be humoured. Thus everyone expects her to follow through her case against her son’s murderer, as they expect her to follow through everything else: to its logical end. When she refuses to do so, they fail to understand her motives and castigate her. But like Vannihamy, the consolation of relief comes to her only after she does what she feels is right.
One of the many motifs which crop up in the story is a dream Baba Nona has: her son is caught adrift in some otherworld, and he’s imploring her to release him. At first she thinks she can liberate her son by putting his killer in prison; after she changes her mind, however, she lights up a lamp, prays, and tells her son that he can finally seek the freedom he craves, since she has chosen to forgive his murderers. It’s no doubt the most powerful moment in the story, and arguably the most heartbreaking; it’s a testament to Visakesa’s direction, and Nita’s acting, that it comes through so convincingly. This is a touchingly absorbing film. Yet as scenes like this show, it mustn’t simply be seen; it must also be experienced.
The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com