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lester-james-peries

Later forays, lesser forays: The man and the milieu

January 31, 2021 by shamilka
Lester James Peries, Uditha Devapriya

The fifth in a series of sketches of the films of Lester James Peries.

Critics are so obsessed over separating the good from the bad, the merited and the prized from the spurned and the forgotten, in an artist’s career that they forget that what made the latter possible was the lesser aspects of the former. No one can deny that the later Hitchcock was bad (very few would contend otherwise), but no one can seriously deny that the Master of Suspense was being anyone other than the Master of Suspense in his later “lesser” films (Marnie, Torn Curtain, Topaz, but not Frenzy and the deliciously enjoyable Family Plot). The bottom line is this, therefore: what make the later forays of a director possible, more often than not, are his earlier excursions into lesser territory. This was as true for Hitchcock as it was for Satyajit Ray or Lester James Peries.

20 films over 50 years are not, to be honest, adequate to pass judgment on Lester’s generally disregarded works, which fall under two broad categories: unqualified failures and unrealised masterpieces. Of those 20, interestingly however, only one can be singled out as a failure on any terms: The God King, back then the most lavishly financed production the West got involved with in the East (Kurosawa had backed out of Tora! Tora! Tora!). The God King was an unmitigated failure precisely because it was that: a production financed by another part of the world, over which technicians appointed elsewhere held sway. The final product – a strange mishmash of Manciewicz’s Cleopatra and Mehboob Khan’s Aan – was as confused as the story of its troubled production, which as Lester recounted deserves an entire book to itself.

The God King is so bizarre: its dialogues so outrageously and unintentionally funny (its campy flavour reminds you of Richard Burton’s deadpan monologues from The Exorcist II: high-flown, profound, yet colossally empty), and the rift between its epic vistas and its anything-but-epic plotline so naked (not for one moment does this rift relax, which is why it reminds me of what Gore Vidal once wrote of Ben-Hur, the 1959 version: “Any attempt to make sense of it would destroy the story’s awful integrity”). Majestically conceived, majestically shot, it was ahead of its time in some respects (for Sri Lanka); in other respects, though, it was and remains as empty and hollow as the final battle between its antihero and his brother.

There is as much of Lester in The God King as there was of Kubrick in Spartacus, and coupled with the fact that it failed financially and critically, this means that it was the first and only detour in the man’s long career. To call it symptomatic of the kind of movies he was directing at that time would be stretching things too far, yet those who conflate the one with the other do so because the time he was in, and the material he had to work with, indicated a shift in the quality of his work that was discernible. But still, extrapolating from this and separating what is considered to be his lesser work from his masterpieces would be an injustice to him because, as I mentioned, much of what critics saw as lacking in his earlier work made its way visibly to his later forays.

Sir Lester James Peries directing the movie 'The God King' in 1974.

David Shipman in his monumental two-volume The Story of Cinema (for which he watched more than 5,000 movies) wrote about Lester in a chapter on the Indian cinema and Satyajit Ray. Having seen every film of his until Ahasin Polawata, except Sandeshaya and, rather strangely, Golu Hadawatha (he makes no mention of them), Shipman contended that inasmuch as Ray was great, Lester was hardly his inferior. But the Western critic’s lack of familiarity with the lives of ordinary people from this part of the world – be they Apu or Charulata or Nanda or Nissanka – showed clearly in Shipman’s indictment of Lester’s work as slow paced. Here he separated Ray and Peries: the former’s films, while also slow, were more richly detailed. Even otherwise great essays as Delovak Athara and Akkara Paha were brought down: the former, “otherwise interesting, fails,” while the latter, at 132 minutes, is “overdue.”

Even Philip Cooray’s book on the man, The Lonely Artist, reflects and affirms in part Shipman’s views, ironic considering that Regi Siriwardena’s foreword repudiates the indictment in clear-cut terms: “I remember an irritated Mexican critic writing of Gamperaliya who said that every line spoken by the characters seems to be preceded and followed by a long silence. In this quality of his films, however, Lester is true to Sinhala life.” Which is true of course: fiercely open we as a people are, we are nevertheless content not in revealing in gushes and torrents our torments and sorrows, but in hinting at them (as Anula Karunatilake does in Golu Hadawatha). But what is pertinent to note here is not whether Lester was being true to life as seen within (David Shipman on Gamperaliya: “I’m not sure whether it reveals the ‘inner lives’ of its characters”) but what flowed from this quality of his: the weaknesses that would adorn even his real masterpieces.

It has been said that our movies are long and overdue and this because of poor planning, editing, scripting, and logistics. Such problems certainly did beset Lester, and they beset independent filmmakers even today, but while they are issues for which the director shouldn’t be held accountable, they do give rise to other issues which are in part at least those of the director. In Lester’s case, slow paced (tiring or otherwise) as his lesser works are, the qualities which they share with his earlier career are so discernible that they can’t miss the careful, discriminating viewer.

In his films, first and foremost, we come across a rift between the individual and his or her society: Sena and the rural peasantry in Rekava, Piyal and the feudal aristocracy in Gamperaliya, Nissanka and the urban bourgeoisie in Delovak Athara. This rift translates into another: between the individual and his or her milieu. The incongruity that results from it is very much present, and accounts at least partly for the strengths of Gamperaliya, Golu Hadawatha, Akkara Paha, and Nidhanaya over the weaknesses of Desa Nisa, Ahasin Polawata, Kaliyugaya, Awaragira, and Wekanda Walawwa.

It’s interesting to observe that almost all his later films were based on the uprooted elite, the aristocracy that he had eulogised in Gamperaliya and laid to rest in Nidhanaya. But in those two films the tensions as such, between our protagonists and their social backdrops, were, while unresolved (Nidhanaya ends with one murder and one suicide), never contradictory; the personal never transcended the milieu. You infer this when you compare Ahasin Polawata with Nidhanaya: both rely on pretty much the same technique, the flashback, but while the inhibitions of Willie Abeynayake are squarely the inhibitions of a decaying elite, the quirks of Sarath are (as Regi Siriwardena observed) never rooted in anything substantive.

Much of the critical drubbing that Lester endured from the late seventies to the early nineties – with Ahasin Polawata, Baddegama, Kaliyugaya, Yuganthaya, Awaragira – can be rooted in the lack of reconciliation between the milieu and the personal in those films, which isn’t to say that he deserved that drubbing: on the contrary, they were symptomatic of the thinly disguised confusions that young critics entertained (our Marxist critics never really understood that the personal experience of a work of art need not always be at the cost of its political relevance; they always wanted political symbols for it to be “relevant”). But I believe that the weaknesses apparent in these five films – Ahasin Polawata with its depiction of Sarath; Baddegama with its miscast cast; Kaliyugaya with the discrepancy between its brilliantly sustained first half-hour and the rest of its duration; Yuganthaya for its lack of engagement with the political; and Awaragira with its quickly cut ending – can be traced to a sustained incongruity between the individual and his or her backdrop.

And yet these are not unsalvageable films: hidden deep within, in several sequences, are feats of astounding technical craftsmanship. With a lavish score by Premasiri Khemadasa that identifies its protagonist with a poignant motif, Kaliyugaya’s first half-hour is a triumph in the use of the flashback in our cinema; Baddegama, while visually weak in many scenes (in Leonard Woolf’s novel Silindu imagines seeing demons in the forest after he angers Punchirala, the exorcist; in the film the director and the scriptwriter provide a literal transposition of these imaginings, with demon faces leering from the trees and the bushes) does bring out some great performances from Joe Abeywickrama as Silindu and Nadeeka Gunasekara as Hinnihami (though not Vijaya Kumaratunga, whose portrayal of the small-time, naive Babun was at odds with his urbane background); while Awaragira is a monumental family epic (with Ranjan Ramanayake’s finest performance to date, a pity considering that he never got offers for more films like it) that ends in a terrible murder by the daughter (Vasanthi Chathurani) of her own brother (Kamal Addararachchi) over her tormented love for her abusive husband (Lucky Dias, in one of his more memorable roles): the sequence, finely shot and edited, reminds me of the murder of Zhinovy in Wajda’s Siberian Lady Macbeth, which was also about a woman torn between two men.

Perhaps the most fitting epitaph to these later and lesser forays of Lester James Peries is this: in the end he gave what he had, genuinely but discriminatingly. And in the end we got out of them what we could have, again genuinely but discriminatingly.

Kaliyugaya

Written for: Daily Mirror, October 31 2017

Posted by Uditha Devapriya

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The indifferent ones: A mild critique of a big celebration

February 16, 2017 by admin
Lester James Peries, Rekava, Sumitra Peries, Titus Thotawatte, uditha, Uditha Devapriya, Willie Blake

Sumitra Peries once told me a story about Rekava. Lester, her husband, along with Titus Thotawatte and Willie Blake, had gone to Cannes to screen it at the Festival. Because the version they had was too long and contained too many songs, they met Lindsay Anderson. The father of the Free Cinema Movement and the British New Wave, Anderson was as much the parvenu Lester was in his country. Cannes, however, was a different ball-game altogether, and so the two of them discussed as to what songs would stay and what songs would be out.

The Western cinema, when it matured after the coming of sound, deliberately avoided the song-and-dance sequences that ran riot in our films. Lester had hence readied himself to cut down on probably all the songs his debut contained. What happened next, however, surprised him.

Anderson watched the film, thought for a moment, then told the man that whatever song he chose to cut, he should leave “Olu Nelum Neriya Ragala” alone. Because he had spent so many years believing that his country’s cinema ought to escape the semi-operatic form it had wallowed in, Lester was naturally stumped when a leading British filmmaker and film theorist ended up asking him to preserve probably the most melodramatic, operatic song in his debut.

He then took Rekava to Cannes. He competed with the likes of Andrzej Wajda, Bergman, Bresson, and William Wyler, the latter of whom won the Jury Prize for his take on the Quakers, Friendly Persuasion. The jury’s verdict, however, was contested, while several writers and filmmakers walked out against what they felt to be the Festival’s bias towards the Americans. But that’s another story.

The event, incidentally, involved a screening of Rekava, with a digital copy refurbished in India. Predictably, there were some preparatory speeches prior to it. Lionel Fernando, Director-General of the Tower Hall Foundation, weighed in on the arts, while Anura Fonseka (the main organiser) spoke rather feelingly on why icons should be celebrated while alive. The Prime Minister, speaking before him, remembered the first time he watched Rekava (“To see my aunt act in it!” he told us not long ago, referring of course to Irangani Serasinghe, who despite being ill made it that evening) and essentially contended that Lester’s worth has become self-evident.

In the meantime, Lester did his country proud. He didn’t win of course, and Sumitra ended her story by telling me, rather lightly I suppose, that “God only knows what he would have got if Lindsay wasn’t so entranced by ‘Olu Nelum Neriya Ragala’.” I added then and there, “God works in mysterious ways.” Sumitra, a Buddhist from a politically nationalist family, smiled and agreed. Lester didn’t hear us, but if he did, he too would have smiled.

Lester J (fragmenteyes.blogspot.com)

Last Sunday, January 29, the Tower Hall Foundation put together an event at the Regal Theatre to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Rekava. The Chief Guest, in keeping with the Tower Hall hierarchy, was Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, while the other guests included Akila Viraj Kariyawasam (whose Ministry has virtually absorbed the Foundation), Gayantha Karunathilaka, Ranga Kalansooriya, and Nimal Bopage.

The Prime Minister was late by half an hour (he’d come from Sithulpahuva), so the show, which began at 7 pm, ended at about 10.30 pm. I don’t know how many directors elsewhere have been able to watch their debuts 60 years after they were first screened, but I do know that they are few in number and that Lester happily lived to be one of them. He exuded a monkish calm, despite his age and despite how tiring the evening would have been, but towards the end, I couldn’t help but notice a veritable stream of emotion in his eyes. The man has earned this day, I thought to myself, with much of that having to do with the film he helped us claim an identity with.

Lester James Peries is the only reminder we have of 1956 and the cultural revolution that year wrought. He is more than a relic, but a relic nevertheless. Malinda Seneviratne, writing 15 years ago, correctly surmised that compared with the other “signatories” to that revolution (Sarachchandra, Wickramasinghe, and Chitrasena), he was more apolitical. That proved to be an asset in the beginning, but as the decades wore on and as a new generation of filmmakers and critics emerged, he earned the ire of those who saw in his work the signature of a yuppie, Colombo elitist. Two stories stand out in this regard.

The first. When Ahas Gawwa premiered in 1974, a pamphlet titled “Appochchige Cinemawa” was distributed to the audience. Appochchi, incidentally, was Lester. In becoming a father, he had become a virtual pariah. Not unlike what Renoir, Clouzot, and the “Establishment” American directors were to the French. With their campaign of intense vitriol, the new rebel directors here tried to emulate the Nouvelle Vague. They were successful, partly at least, but eventually and as was the case elsewhere, their work deteriorated. In the end, only one person stood out: the man they’d denigrated as their papa.

Lindsay Anderson(fragmenteyes.blogspot.com)

The second. When Yuganthaya premiered in 1983, a group of critics went to town over its (allegedly) immature handling of the political. I remember Bandula Nanayakkarawasam, talking with me about Lester and our cinema in general, pointing out that these critics focused on how Lester had depicted the clash between labour and capital. Bandula didn’t take sides, but a more prominent filmmaker from that era, known for his political stances and for films with a political edge, did. “Even in Yuganthaya, he couldn’t go beyond the family” was what he said.

The point I’m driving here is that despite the nostalgia that flowed that Sunday evening, the man being celebrated had to endure a rough ride. To make matters worse, that rough ride hasn’t ended even now. Just two weeks ago, for instance, he and Sumitra got news that their house, which they had continuously occupied for many, many years, had been sold off to a new tenant.

Whatever the legal technicalities behind the change of ownership may be, isn’t it rather telling that the man who fathered our cinema has to flirt with the threat of eviction? Isn’t it rather telling that people who appreciate him don’t appreciate his worth? Has Lester the man been so cut off from Lester the director that while we cosmetically shout praises for him, we neglect his work? These are questions that went unasked last Sunday. They should have been asked. Whether or not they can be answered.

All these observations are manifestly true and pertinent. Leaving the Regal that forlorn Sunday night, however, I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Do we remember that they are?”

Thinking back on the miserly producers who botched his films (in particular, Awaragira, which could have become the Great Family Chronicle it wasn’t), the critics who attacked him arbitrarily, the 30 out of 50 years in his career that he spent idling, the ancestral property he and his wife had to auction off to sustain their lives, and the struggles they have to endure even today (far removed, it must be noted, from those of less well-off filmmakers, who died penniless and bitterly regretting the life they squandered for the sake of the movies), I could only conclude: we celebrate, yes, and we put in great effort to show that we care. But do we appreciate?

I for one think not. Call me a pessimist, but that evening ended rather bitterly. I liked the fact that the Tower Hall Foundation had opted for something other than the conventional anniversary and I appreciate their effort, both as a lover of the cinema and an admirer of the man at the centre of their event. This is not an indictment on the organisers. This is an indictment on those who never cared about Lester James Peries when he was active. An indictment on those of us who never bothered. In other words, an indictment on the indifferent ones

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