Features

Tony Ranasinghe,in full flow – 2

Published

3 years ago

2022/09/9

By Uditha Devapriya

This is the second in a series of candid vignettes about Tony Ranasinghe.Something curious happens to actors when they age: they become parodies of themselves. Nowhere is this truer than the American film industry. When Kirk Douglas tries to man up in The Fury, one of his last great performances, he tries to pass off as a Spartacus, reminding us of who he once was. Some actors pass the years gracefully, like Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City. Many don’t. They remind us of who they were while forgetting who they are. Even the best among them tend to flounder: that is why the later Brando is not as good as the early Brando. Stars like Clint Eastwood play it smart: they end their acting careers and turn to the director’s chair.

This almost never happens in Sri Lanka. Gamini Fonseka’s best late performance has to be in Sumitra Peries’s Loku Duwa. Here he threatens to overreach himself, by embodying what we associated with him and overturning our notions of him. We are shocked when we hear him speak: he’s slouchy and he’s strange. He doesn’t talk, he mumbles, like the upstart businessman he is. But there’s a scene right at the beginning where he fumbles around with a cigarette lighter in a Mercedes-Benz, right next to the Kalutara Bodhiya, where he doesn’t speak a word, and still makes us aware that it’s him we are seeing. Like the prima ballerina who never ages, Gamini Fonseka remained who he was; when he sings with Nadeeka Gunasekara, it’s almost a throwback to those old films where he paired with Malini Fonseka and Geetha Kumarasinghe.

With Vijaya Kumaratunga the issue wasn’t that he didn’t want to age, but that he couldn’t afford to. The only two real performances that feature him as an ageing patriarch are, not coincidentally, in two “serious” pictures: Sumitra Peries’s Ganga Addara and Vasantha Obeyesekere’s Kadapathaka Chaya. In Kadapathaka Chaya he’s cast against type, as the villain. There have been rumours that Kumaratunga’s family were wary of him accepting the role, because he was at the peak of his career – Nombara 17 came around the same time Obeyesekere’s film did – and because he was putting everything he had into his political career. It won for him the only Sarasaviya Award he got in his entire career – the first and the last, since it would also be his last role. Like Fonseka, he raged against the passing years and pulled it off. Both were maturing, but both wanted to retain their youth.

Tony Ranasinghe is probably the only actor in Sri Lanka who showed that he was evolving and maturing. Fonseka tried hard not to – except in films like Yuganthaya and Sagarayak Meda, where he had to be serious – and Joe Abeywickrema didn’t – again, except in films like Loku Duwa and Awaragira, where he played a less comic tune. Ranasinghe’s best years were spent in the 1960s, the decade of flower power and youth resistance. Hailing from Ape Kattiya, which specialised in the Angry Young Man plays that British playwrights like Joe Orton had staged, he took to the character of the alienated youth like a duck to water. In Delovak Athara he more or less played the role he would play until the end of the decade. He typified it in the same way Fonseka typified the tough goodhearted rowdy in Chandiya. Yet he couldn’t escape the passing years. As they passed, he had to change.

Because he was cast as the villain, Ranasinghe didn’t ring true in Ran Salu. Even then, he’s hesitant and he fumbles around: right after impregnating the woman who dotes on him, he tells her that he’s leaving her, that he’ll look after her. Yet even in this scene – in a hospital – he can’t get the words out. In the previous sequence he contemplates abandoning her for his new fiancée, an heiress. The heiress gets him to stop thinking about the girl with whom he has fathered a child. If Ranasinghe couldn’t really play the role of the heartless teenager, it’s because he could not fully let go of the tragic romantic figure he had embodied so well. Perhaps because he doesn’t ring true, the sequence where he tells the girl, played by Anula Karunathilake, that he’s leaving her is awkward, almost out of place with the rest of the film. It’s like Bette Davis playing the vamp in the 1940s: it doesn’t fit his profile.

Soon that profile began to change. His outline is the same in Parasathumal, which marks the last time he played the tragic romantic figure in a major film. Yet he is changing here too. There’s a sequence in Parasathumal where, having discovered that the man who has hired him to look after his manor – played by Gamini Fonseka – is going after the woman he loves, he takes up his gun in a fit of anger and traipses through the woods. The camera cuts from long shot to close-up, zooming into his angry face. There’s not so much anger on it as there is frustration. The gun symbolises everything he wants to put out – it symbolises the macho bravado he is conspicuously lacking. Halfway through he gives up, and turns the other way around. That turnaround is predictable, and characteristic.

With Hanthane Kathawa, he officially ended this phase in his career. Hanthane Kathawa, like Parasathumal, pits Ranasinghe’s character against a man vying for the affections of the woman he loves and courts. He has his supporters, like Amarasiri Kalansuriya, but whether it’s an election to a student body or a singing contest on top of the Hanthane Hills, he soon betrays his lack of masculine bravado. Henry Jayasena goes through a similar ordeal in G. D. L. Perera’s Dahasak Sithuvili – he recites a “serious” tune at a party, only to be upended by his rival, who sings “Sathutu Vilai” and enlivens everyone around him. Hanthane Kathawa ends with Ranasinghe finally realising that he can’t have the girl he wants: she goes into a cave with the other man, played by Vijaya Kumaratunga. Ranasinghe is full of despair, and is stung by her betrayal, but instead of throwing a tantrum, he turns around.

Beneath the sensitive façade, Ranasinghe’s characters had an air of carelessness about them. “They are most alive (and most appealing) because they don’t conceive of the day after tomorrow,” Pauline Kael once observed of Jean-Luc Godard’s characters. This is very true of the characters in Dharmasena Pathiraja’s films – particularly in Para Dige – but it is also true of Tony Ranasinghe’s protagonists. As the villain he always makes himself out as a suave, self-confident planner, the man who knows what will happen tomorrow or the day after that. But as the tragic romantic he had no plans. You don’t really feel the time flowing in Delovak Athara as much as you do in, say, Gamperaliya, because Ranasinghe doesn’t have a plan. Fittingly, on the morning after the accident in Peries’s film, Nissanka gets up, listens to the ticking of the clock, and shuts it. He doesn’t want to think ahead.

Unfortunately or fortunately for him, he was growing up, and so were his characters. He was caught between two worlds – the reckless, tragic foolishness of his early years and the more serious outlook of his later years. He could neither be reckless nor wise. Yet his profile and outline were changing considerably: from the lanky, thin youth he had once been, he had now become stouter, his hair dishevelled beyond recognition. His two best films from this period, Duhulu Malak and Ahasin Polawata, no longer have him as the lover: he is instead the husband. But the dilemma is the same: he craves their love, but because of his doubts or their indiscretions he is reduced to crying and raging. You couldn’t have imagined Gamini Fonseka in this situation because he wouldn’t have cared: he would have got the woman to come back to him. Vijaya wouldn’t have cared either, because his women would never have left him. With Ranasinghe the situation was more complicated.

Films like Duhulu Malak and Ahasin Polawa have their weaknesses and shortcomings. Yet they are saved by Ranasinghe’s performance. As Regi Siriwardena once observed, Ahasin Polawa, unlike Nidhanaya, takes no effort to ground the jealous imaginings and obsessions of its protagonist in anything substantive. His feelings are self-contained, a far cry from Willie Abeynayake’s in Nidhanaya. Yet Ranasinghe does something no other actor could have done: he makes us empathise with these feelings and emotions. A lesser actor would have lost it. The last scene in Duhulu Malak, of the husband imagining himself shooting his wife, plays out rather falsely. It’s an emotional rollercoaster ride. And yet, as the husband, Ranasinghe gets us to understand his torment. In one sense he had grown in these years, far away from the tragic lover he had been playing earlier. Yet in another he had not. Caught between two worlds, he had failed, even by now, to get out of either.

The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com

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Features

Acid test emerges for US-EU ties

Published

1 hour ago

2026/01/22

Sahan Weerasooriya

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday put forward the EU’s viewpoint on current questions in international politics with a clarity, coherence and eloquence that was noteworthy. Essentially, she aimed to leave no one in doubt that a ‘new form of European independence’ had emerged and that European solidarity was at a peak.

These comments emerge against the backdrop of speculation in some international quarters that the Post-World War Two global political and economic order is unraveling. For example, if there was a general tacit presumption that US- Western European ties in particular were more or less rock-solid, that proposition apparently could no longer be taken for granted.

For instance, while US President Donald Trump is on record that he would bring Greenland under US administrative control even by using force against any opposition, if necessary, the EU Commission President was forthright that the EU stood for Greenland’s continued sovereignty and independence.

In fact at the time of writing, small military contingents from France, Germany, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands are reportedly already in Greenland’s capital of Nook for what are described as limited reconnaissance operations. Such moves acquire added importance in view of a further comment by von der Leyen to the effect that the EU would be acting ‘in full solidarity with Greenland and Denmark’; the latter being the current governing entity of Greenland.

It is also of note that the EU Commission President went on to say that the ‘EU has an unwavering commitment to UK’s independence.’ The immediate backdrop to this observation was a UK decision to hand over administrative control over the strategically important Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia to Mauritius in the face of opposition by the Trump administration. That is, European unity in the face of present controversial moves by the US with regard to Greenland and other matters of contention is an unshakable ‘given’.

It is probably the fact that some prominent EU members, who also hold membership of NATO, are firmly behind the EU in its current stand-offs with the US that is prompting the view that the Post-World War Two order is beginning to unravel. This is, however, a matter for the future. It will be in the interests of the contending quarters concerned and probably the world to ensure that the present tensions do not degenerate into an armed confrontation which would have implications for world peace.

However, it is quite some time since the Post-World War Two order began to face challenges. Observers need to take their minds back to the Balkan crisis and the subsequent US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the immediate Post-Cold War years, for example, to trace the basic historic contours of how the challenges emerged. In the above developments the seeds of global ‘disorder’ were sown.

Such ‘disorder’ was further aggravated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine four years ago. Now it may seem that the world is reaping the proverbial whirlwind. It is relevant to also note that the EU Commission President was on record as pledging to extend material and financial support to Ukraine in its travails.

Currently, the international law and order situation is such that sections of the world cannot be faulted for seeing the Post World War Two international order as relentlessly unraveling, as it were. It will be in the interests of all concerned for negotiated solutions to be found to these global tangles. In fact von der Leyen has committed the EU to finding diplomatic solutions to the issues at hand, including the US-inspired tariff-related squabbles.

Given the apparent helplessness of the UN system, a pre-World War Two situation seems to be unfolding, with those states wielding the most armed might trying to mould international power relations in their favour. In the lead-up to the Second World War, the Hitlerian regime in Germany invaded unopposed one Eastern European country after another as the League of Nations stood idly by. World War Two was the result of the Allied Powers finally jerking themselves out of their complacency and taking on Germany and its allies in a full-blown world war.

However, unlike in the late thirties of the last century, the seeming number one aggressor, which is the US this time around, is not going unchallenged. The EU which has within its fold the foremost of Western democracies has done well to indicate to the US that its power games in Europe are not going unmonitored and unchecked. If the US’ designs to take control of Greenland and Denmark, for instance, are not defeated the world could very well be having on its hands, sooner rather than later, a pre-World War Two type situation.

Ironically, it is the ‘World’s Mightiest Democracy’ which is today allowing itself to be seen as the prime aggressor in the present round of global tensions. In the current confrontations, democratic opinion the world over is obliged to back the EU, since it has emerged as the principal opponent of the US, which is allowing itself to be seen as a fascist power.

Hopefully sane counsel would prevail among the chief antagonists in the present standoff growing, once again, out of uncontainable territorial ambitions. The EU is obliged to lead from the front in resolving the current crisis by diplomatic means since a region-wide armed conflict, for instance, could lead to unbearable ill-consequences for the world.

It does not follow that the UN has no role to play currently. Given the existing power realities within the UN Security Council, the UN cannot be faulted for coming to be seen as helpless in the face of the present tensions. However, it will need to continue with and build on its worldwide development activities since the global South in particular needs them very badly.

The UN needs to strive in the latter directions more than ever before since multi-billionaires are now in the seats of power in the principle state of the global North, the US. As the charity Oxfam has pointed out, such financially all-powerful persons and allied institutions are multiplying virtually incalculably. It follows from these realities that the poor of the world would suffer continuous neglect. The UN would need to redouble its efforts to help these needy sections before widespread poverty leads to hemispheric discontent.

Features

Brighten up your skin …

Published

1 hour ago

2026/01/22

Sahan Weerasooriya

Hi! This week I’ve come up with tips to brighten up your skin.

* Turmeric and Yoghurt Face Pack:

You will need 01 teaspoon of turmeric powder and 02 tablespoons of fresh yoghurt.

Mix the turmeric and yoghurt into a smooth paste and apply evenly on clean skin. Leave it for 15–20 minutes and then rinse with lukewarm water

Benefits:

Reduces pigmentation, brightens dull skin and fights acne-causing bacteria.

* Lemon and Honey Glow Pack:

Mix 01teaspoon lemon juice and 01 tablespoon honey and apply it gently to the face. Leave for 10–15 minutes and then wash off with cool water.

Benefits:

Lightens dark spots, improves skin tone and deeply moisturises. By the way, use only 01–02 times a week and avoid sun exposure after use.

* Aloe Vera Gel Treatment:

All you need is fresh aloe vera gel which you can extract from an aloe leaf. Apply a thin layer, before bedtime, leave it overnight, and then wash face in the morning.

Benefits:

Repairs damaged skin, lightens pigmentation and adds natural glow.

* Rice Flour and Milk Scrub:

You will need 01 tablespoon rice flour and 02 tablespoons fresh milk.

Mix the rice flour and milk into a thick paste and then massage gently in circular motions. Leave for 10 minutes and then rinse with water.

Benefits:

Removes dead skin cells, improves complexion, and smoothens skin.

* Tomato Pulp Mask:

Apply the tomato pulp directly, leave for 15 minutes, and then rinse with cool water

Benefits:

Controls excess oil, reduces tan, and brightens skin naturally.

Features

Shooting for the stars …

Published

1 hour ago

2026/01/22

Sahan Weerasooriya

That’s precisely what 25-year-old Hansana Balasuriya has in mind – shooting for the stars – when she was selected to represent Sri Lanka on the international stage at Miss Intercontinental 2025, in Sahl Hasheesh, Egypt.

The grand finale is next Thursday, 29th January, and Hansana is all geared up to make her presence felt in a big way.

Her journey is a testament to her fearless spirit and multifaceted talents … yes, her life is a whirlwind of passion, purpose, and pageantry.

Raised in a family of water babies (Director of The Deep End and Glory Swim Shop), Hansana’s love affair with swimming began in childhood and then she branched out to master the “art of 8 limbs” as a Muay Thai fighter, nailed Karate and Kickboxing (3-time black belt holder), and even threw herself into athletics (literally!), especially throwing events, and netball, as well.

A proud Bishop’s College alumna, Hansana’s leadership skills also shone bright as Senior Choir Leader.

She earned a BA (Hons) in Business Administration from Esoft Metropolitan University, and then the world became her playground.

Before long, modelling and pageantry also came into her scene.

She says she took to part-time modelling, as a hobby, and that led to pageants, grabbing 2nd Runner-up titles at Miss Nature Queen and Miss World Sri Lanka 2025.

When she’s not ruling the stage, or pool, Hansana’s belting tunes with Soul Sounds, Sri Lanka’s largest female ensemble.

What’s more, her artistry extends to drawing, and she loves hitting the open road for long drives, she says.

This water warrior is also on a mission – as Founder of Wave of Safety,

Hansana happens to be the youngest Executive Committee Member of the Sri Lanka Aquatic Sports Union (SLASU) and, as founder of Wave of Safety, she’s spreading water safety awareness and saving lives.

Today is Hansana’s ninth day in Egypt and the itinerary for today, says National Director for Sri Lanka, Brian Kerkoven, is ‘Jeep Safari and Sunset at the Desert.’

And … the all-important day at Miss Intercontinental 2025 is next Thursday, 29th January.

Well, good luck to Hansana.