The first Lester James Peries Oration I attended was in 2013. It was held at the BMICH and was officiated by Professor Sunil Ariyaratne, who spoke on the music in Lester’s films, and Lakshman Joseph de Saram, who dwelt more broadly on the importance of film music. Immediately after the event, I connected with Lester and Sumitra and stayed in touch, until Lester’s passing in 2018 and Sumitra’s passing five years later.
I have written at length about my encounters with both, so I will not recount them here. But I felt like returning to that period in my life on Wednesday, 16 July, as the Lester James Peries and Sumitra Peries Foundation organised its first oration since Lester’s death seven years ago.
The theme for this year’s oration was on Sumitra: timely, and fitting, given how interest in her has been revived following the recent 4k restoration of her debut, ‘Gehenu Lamai’ – a work which, as I put it on Facebook after it was screened at Cannes two months ago, one invariably grows up with, and grows into, in Sri Lanka.
A Sri Lankan woman of the world
Lauded abroad, yet received somewhat lukewarmly at home, ‘Gehenu Lamai’ contains so much beneath the surface that it’s difficult to know where to begin when reviewing it. It was, in its own, quiet way, a revolutionary work of art, in the context of not just Sri Lankan or South Asian but even Asian cinema: at that point, in the late 1970s, few films about South Asian women had been made, if at all, by South Asian women directors.
As I noted in my obituary on her, this largely stemmed from Sumitra’s achievement as the first woman filmmaker of her kind in the region, who graduated to the director’s chair not as an actress, but as a deeply grounded, yet cosmopolitan technician-cum-artiste.
In that sense, Sumitra was a Sri Lankan woman of the world, even if such honorifics do little justice to her achievements. To the last, she refused to be pigeonholed into political and artistic labels.
Certainly, she took her craft – whether as editor, assistant director, or director – very seriously, as Vilasnee Tampoe-Hautin has reminded us in her groundbreaking study. Talking with the great Satyajit Ray in 1963 in Mexico, where ‘Gamperaliya’ was being screened, she bristled at the Bengali director’s casual dismissal of the editor’s role: in Ray’s view, editing seemed a more glorified term for cutting.
Tampoe-Hautin has recounted that Sumitra uncharacteristically flew into a slight temper there. “Well,” she retorted. “I’m glad I’m not just a cutter!”
Sumitra’s visions of womanhood
One point of contention about Sumitra’s career is whether, as Sri Lanka’s premier woman filmmaker, she espoused feminist ideals. I think Tampoe-Hautin frames the question well in her study: ‘Feminist or Feminine?’
When ‘Gehenu Lamai’ was screened in London, one critic wrote of its “feminine sensibility”. The plaudit is well deserved, because I can’t think of another Sri Lankan film that not only has so many female characters, but is suffused by an innocence that makes us identify with them until the end. Yet one can question whether this in itself qualifies ‘Gehenu Lamai’ as a feminist work.
At the time of Sumitra’s films, there were at least two other films that portrayed women in a rather different light: Vasantha Obeyesekere’s ‘Palangetiyo’ and Dharmasena Pathiraja’s ‘Bambaru Avith.’ In retrospect, both predicted the Sri Lankan cinema of the 1980s, specifically with respect to its depiction of its female protagonists.
Malini Fonseka’s role as Helen in Pathiraja’s film, particularly, proved to be groundbreaking in the context of Sri Lankan cinema; it occupies a world or two away from Vasanthi Chathurani’s performance as Kusum in ‘Gehenu Lamai.’ Yet both ‘Bambaru Avith’ and ‘Palangetiyo’ depict women who are as trapped in their social circumstances as Kusum; the difference lies in how they try to escape them, and in doing so fall prey to much tragedy.
In this respect, Obeyesekere’s treatment of the female protagonist in ‘Palangetiyo’ – who also, coincidentally, is called Kusum – is closer to Sumitra’s vision of femininity in ‘Gehenu Lamai.’
Obeyesekere’s storyline is in all respects the obverse of Sumitra’s: in ‘Palangetiyo,’ unlike ‘Gehenu Lamai,’ it is the girl who is rich – the pampered daughter of a printing mudalali – and the boy – Dharmasiri Bandaranayake in his first film role since ‘Bak Maha Akunu,’ which was edited by Sumitra – who is poor. And in ‘Palangetiyo,’ it is the girl who has to adjust to a life of penury after eloping with her lover.
Yet at a certain level, Obeyesekere’s film mirrors some of the themes in Sumitra’s. There is, for instance, a constant tension between sentimental love and class realities: Kusum in ‘Gehenu Lamai’ dreams of living together with Nimal, despite her fear of defying social taboos, in much the same way Kusum in ‘Palangetiyo’ brushes aside those taboos in her love for Sarath.
Yet, eventually, they are confronted by the consequences of their actions: Kusum in ‘Palangetiyo,’ when she moves into a tenement with Sarath after unsuccessfully trying to settle into his mother’s home, and Kusum in ‘Gehenu Lamai,’ when her lover’s mother finds out about their affair and banishes her from their house.
Obeyesekere would later embrace a more radical conception of femininity in his films, the apogee of which would be ‘Dadayama’ and ‘Kedapathaka Chaya.’ Sumitra, by contrast, held on to her visions of womanhood – for better or worse.
Challenging patriarchy
I remember one evening, somewhere in 2014, when I asked Sumitra what she had to say to those critics who accused her of depicting women in a defeatist light. Her response was as clear as it could be: that she could only portray the women of her films differently “at the expense of manipulating them”.
In that sense, I think Sumitra understood that one could challenge patriarchy – a forever lurking theme in her work – only by acknowledging that it was there, in all its manifestations, and that women accommodated it by succumbing to it – as Vasanthi Chathurani does in ‘Gehenu Lamai’ and ‘Ganga Addara’ – before defying it – as Nadeeka Gunasekara does in ‘Yahalu Yeheli,’ and Yashoda Wimaladharma does in Sumitra’s swansong, ‘Vaishnavee,’ 40 years after ‘Gehenu Lamai.’
(The writer is a researcher and foreign policy and political commentator based in Sri Lanka. He can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com)
(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication)