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Locating Swarna Mallawarachchi

27 Oct 2021

By Uditha Devapriya With a career spanning more than 50 years, Swarna Mallawarachchi has taken part in a little more than 50 films (1). In a country where actors are remembered by quantity and not quality, this is hardly an impressive record. Yet many of those 50 films have gone down as highly acclaimed landmarks, and they have brought her face-to-face with the Sri Lankan cinema’s leading directors – though with the dismal exception of its foremost filmmaker. They have also been crucial to her evolution as a highly dedicated actress, one of the finest from her generation. What explains her appeal? Unlike Malini Fonseka and Geetha Kumarasinghe, Swarna’s characters embody a kind of tragic force that remains hard to define. They very rarely smile, but when they do it almost always presages disaster. In Dadayama, for instance, Rathmalie falls for her tormentor not once, but twice. The few occasions where she smiles suggest an end to her troubles; the audience is made to think that her tormentor, played to perfection by Ravindra Randeniya, will accept responsibility for what he has done to her. This is, of course, the typical formula of a stereotypical formulaic romance; the wayward man comes back to the woman he wronged and starts life anew with her. Swarna’s smile, in that sense, hints at the possibility of reconciliation. But as the story unfolds, she is denied such a fate, the ending instead leaves us with the image of her bloodied, dead face. While sensuality for the typical Sinhala film actress has served to ensnare if not lure the men of her dreams, in Swarna’s case it almost seems to militate against the women she acts out. In Kadapathaka Chaya, for example, her character is raped early on by her brother-in-law. Later, when he marries her off to an army officer and she falls on harder times, she extracts favours from him, adroitly making use of his guilt. The brother-in-law, for his part, refuses to let go of the affair, which everyone except her husband seems to know about. The entire plot has a fatalistic touch to it, and as one confrontation leads to another, we realise it’s all going to end horribly. Unlike in Dadayama, though, Swarna escapes with her life. Yet her survival comes at the cost of her husband’s humanity; we thus see for ourselves that sensuality, and sexuality, is serving in these films the opposite function to that served in countless romantic tearjerkers for countless Sinhala actresses. This is rare in a film industry where women are constantly being idealised, fetishised, and objectified. Much of that has to do, I think, with the way women are represented in her films. Halfway through Dadayama, that most gentle of Sinhala actresses, Iranganie Serasinghe, makes an appearance as the mother of Rathmalie’s tormentor. As she chides Ravindra Randeniya and as the two of them promise to take care of Rathmalie and ask her to come with them to their home, we imagine that things are getting better. Serasinghe evokes a quaintness and kindliness so typical of that excellent actress; when she and Randeniya take her away in a car, we thus wonder whether the story has reached a happy ending.  We soon realise it has not; Serasinghe’s true motives are revealed a few scenes later. With the shock of seeing through her charade, we immediately understand that for Swarna’s characters, no less than the codes of femininity are open to subversion. Swarna got to act in these films at the peak of her career, between the early 1980s and the late 1990s. Inverting accepted norms of womanhood, her characters occupied a world of their own. If they don’t strictly conform to feminist notions – in an interview with Malinda Seneviratne years ago, she admitted that she believes “in a feminism that is fundamentally based on motherhood” – they nonetheless subvert patriarchal expectations. At first she had been unwilling to take on these characters – “One look at Hansa Vilak’s script”, she recalled, “and I felt I was going to play a vamp” – but she had soon convinced herself that “this was the kind of performance I was born for”. Coveted at every other awards ceremony, Swarna’s portrayal of a misunderstood lover in Hansa Vilak followed a string of secondary roles in several highly acclaimed films. Those roles themselves had come to her following her return to Sri Lanka in 1977, after a brief hiatus in England. Prior to her departure, she had taken part in quite a few films. The first of these had been Siri Gunasinghe’s Sath Samudura (1966). “As a girl I admired Gunasinghe’s poetry,” she remembered, “In fact, free verse was quite the rage then.” Answering an advertisement, she had gone to meet him, “thrilled less by the prospect of being in his film than by the chance of talking to him”. Having interviewed her, Gunasinghe had immediately asked D.B. Nihalsinghe to screen-test her. More demanding than his superior, Nihalsinghe nevertheless had been impressed enough to take her onboard after the test: “Later, he told me my sharp nose was what had made up his mind,” she added. Sath Samudura would be coveted by critics, and even, to an extent, by popular audiences. It immediately pushed Swarna to a career she had only flippantly thought of entering before; not too long afterwards, she got the chance to work under another maverick director, Sugathapala Senarath Yapa, aboard his debut, Hanthane Kathawa. Cast opposite Tony Ranasinghe and a still young Vijaya Kumaratunga, she revelled in that performance as well. Yapa later admitted that when he got Swarna to act: “I asked her to think of Audrey Hepburn from My Fair Lady.” What Swarna does in Hanthane Kathawa is to embody the passive, statuesque presence that Hepburn exudes, immediately after her transformation into a genteel lady. There are times when she breaks off, but for the most, she maintains an almost enigmatic poise. It is this, I think, that so torments Ranasinghe’s character; he desires her, but just can’t bring himself to declare his affections for her. As the woman at the centre of his tragedy, Swarna echoes his struggles and frustrations rather well. Though she returned from England in the late 1970s intending to land leading parts, she had to wait. “I realised that our cinema had changed heavily while I had stayed away. We now had the likes of Geetha Kumarasinghe and Veena Jayakody. At the same time, I understood that to get in, I had to play the roles I got, not the roles I wanted.” Her former mentor, D.B. Nihalsinghe was only too willing to guide her. “One of the first films I got upon my return was his Ridi Nimnaya (1982), opposite Nadeeka Gunasekara.” There were four others; Sarath Rupasinghe’s Sankapali (1980), Yasapalitha Nanayakkara’s Anjana (1981), Parakrama de Silva’s Biththi Hathara (1982), and Sumitra Peries’s Yahalu Yeheli (1982). The second of these had been a thoroughly commercial affair: “It’s the only movie where I’ve danced.” However, she did not regret the experience: “Anjana was, all in all, a good commercial flick, and it gave me a more wholesome idea of acting.” Meanwhile, critics were beginning to notice her, particularly the OCIC Awards, “which gave me the award for Best Supporting Actress for Ridi Nimnaya, Biththi Hathara, and Yahalu Yeheli, not surprising since all three films came out the same year”. Her association with Sumitra Peries in Yahalu Yeheli brought about two of her finest performances; as the mother of a girl who may or may not be a reincarnation of a murdered young woman in Maya (1984), and, more memorably, as a widowed mother looking after her son against the backdrop of poverty and hunger in the North Central Province, in Sagara Jalaya (1988). Considered today as Peries’s finest work, Sagara Jalaya brought instant acclaim for Swarna: “People drew parallels between that role and another I got at the same time, as Suddhi in Dharmasiri Bandaranayake’s Suddhilage Kathawa, no doubt because both had been based on stories by Simon Nawagaththegama.” Since these performances, she has won acclaim for countless films. One of her most recent, Asoka Handagama’s Age Asa Aga, saw her return to the screen after about a decade, while another, Naomal Perera’s Dada Ima, sees her take up a role from Dadayama 30 years after the events of that film. There’s obviously more to come. Despite having worked and continuing to work with the Sinhala cinema’s leading directors, Swarna, surprisingly enough, never got the chance of working under its foremost figurehead. When I asked Lester James Peries as to why he never selected her, he confessed: “I did not come up with a character that could fit her mould.” Coincidentally enough, this is the same reason Sumitra Peries cites for not having cast Malini Fonseka. For me, that reveals how difficult it is to cast certain performers on film. Not that Swarna has much regrets on this score; she’s collaborated with enough and more veterans in the field to say she has several years left ahead. Wrapping up our interview, she hinted at the possibility of more films and more performances. “The future holds a great deal of potential for me,” she told me while smiling, “I’ll let it decide where I want to go.” Reference
  1. Sri Laankeeya Cinamaa Wanshaya, Nuwan Nayanjith Kumara, Sarasavi, 2005.
(The writer is a freelance writer who is presently studying international relations at the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies [BCIS]. He can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com)

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