Malaka Dewapriya’s film ‘Bahuchithawadiya’ (The Undecided) is an ambitious but ultimately disoriented work that attempts to offer a portrait of the youth adrift in post-civil-conflict urban Sri Lanka.
The film takes the form of a character study, which according to the director’s own introduction, “presents a reflection of the youth of this time, who are searching for easy ways to survive due to lack of job security and are immersed in the dream of escaping this country, using social media, smartphones, and iPhones to achieve their old dream, and making all connections their victims.”
The film has garnered attention for its experimental tone and portrayal of alienation among the impoverished unemployed – jobless or precariously employed and exploited in the gig economy – youth in Colombo. However, beneath its cinematic form, the film offers a bleak, superficial depiction of social decay and a disheartening and ultimately reactionary indictment of working-class and unemployed youth – not as victims of capitalism, but as the agents of their own moral downfall.
A collection of symptoms
The protagonist, Sasitha (Kalana Gunasekara), is a delivery worker in Colombo, the industrial capital of the country. He is employed under precarious conditions by a miserly boss. With no prospects for economic or social mobility, Sasitha turns his attention to seducing women online – married, unmarried, older, younger – all in the hopes of securing a visa to a European country or gaining some financial benefit.
His duplicity and exploitation of these women are portrayed not as unwilling and temporary predatory responses to a brutal economic system but as intrinsic and permanent features of his character. What emerges out of him is not a layered human being, but a cypher of cynicism and indecision. Herein lies one of the film’s most serious failings: The absence of any serious attempt to explain the portrayal of Sasitha’s behaviour through the conflicting social forces and material conditions in which he lives.
Dewapriya has captured certain surface features of social life. The film presents a series of acidic behaviours – adultery, betrayal, cheating, exploitation, desperation – yet none are given sustained focus or examined in depth to reveal their underlying contradictions. As a result, the viewer is left with a collection of symptoms, rather than an understanding of the social reality that gives rise to them.
This is not merely an aesthetic or artistic shortcoming, but a deeply ideological one. An artist is not supposed to simply replicate life; he is not a photographer. He bears the responsibility of discovering the truth. By isolating Sasitha’s personal corruption from the real world that produces it and stands in contradiction to it, ‘Bahuchithawadiya’, despite its claims to realism, ultimately proves to be profoundly evasive and dishonest.
It is not enough to show that a character, representing ‘contemporary youth’, is indecisive, manipulative, and amoral. One must ask: Why? What has shaped this poisonous character? What forces act upon him? Who is responsible for his life? Is his behaviour inevitable?
Dewapriya seems uninterested in these questions. Sasitha is not portrayed as a victim of the capitalist system, a toxic social order, nor as someone with even the faintest sense of resistance to its injustices. Instead, he appears as its willing accomplice – both seeking to benefit from its corruption and attempting, paradoxically, to escape its consequences. ‘The youth’, as we have known it, has ceased to be.
Director’s failures
The film’s final scene shows Sasitha mechanically resuming his practice of seducing women online, without the slightest remorse – even after having been caught red-handed in his previous deceptions. This serves as a conclusive testament that the filmmaker is less concerned with exploring the real social and psychological dynamics shaping youth behaviour, and more intent on confirming a middle-class ideology that views oppressed youth as inherently selfish, untrustworthy, incorrigible, and erratic.
The film’s central concept – ‘Bahuchithawadiya’ – suggests a permanent, innate condition of moral and psychological ambiguity. This is entirely ahistorical and unscientific. The youth of Sri Lanka are not indecisive because they are naturally cynical or morally bankrupt. They are uncertain because their lives are uncertain: Jobless, underpaid, precariously housed, exploited. The labour market offers no security. Political parties offer no hope. Trade unions have betrayed them. Their so-called indecision is not a failing; it is a symptom of a broader social crisis.
Indeed, the idea that Sri Lankan youth are fundamentally morally degraded is refuted by events themselves. In 2022, tens of thousands of young people took to the streets in an unprecedented mass uprising, protesting the unbearable cost of living, fuel shortages, authoritarian repression, and the corruption of the ruling political establishment. This movement did not emerge suddenly from a generation lost in nihilism, but from a population forced to resist and confront the consequences of decades of neoliberal policy and imperialist subjugation.
To assert, as the film does, that youth have no dignity or direction because, in the backdrop of a predatory economy, they are inherently flawed, is to participate in a reactionary ideological project of the bourgeoisie and the upper middle class, who recoil in fear at the sight of the impoverished, unemployed, and restless young.
Social dynamics
Devapriya offers the youth no future and no past. They are not portrayed sympathetically. They are merely floating signifiers of decay, cynicism, and amorality. They are uninfluenced by any sense of resistance, struggle, solidarity, or political awakening. Even in Colombo, the epicentre of industry and protest, Sasitha never encounters a strike, a rally, or even a conversation that hints at collective resistance.
There is not even a passing allusion to conscious class war measures – austerity, privatisation, debt crises, or the militarisation of public life following the end of the civil conflict – realities that are inescapable features of everyday life in the country. The working class – despite its overwhelming presence and historical importance – is nowhere to be found. Instead, we are shown a hermetically sealed world of urban apartments and transactional relationships, in which everyone is either a victimiser or a dupe.
Sasitha flicks through television channels airing religious sermons, astrology segments, and reality shows – programmes ostensibly meant to shape the youth – but never news, politics, or protest. The enemy is distant, and the struggle is futile. This is no accident, but a deliberate artistic choice – one that lays bare the filmmaker’s class perspective. Ultimately, the youth does not happen to find their class enemy.
Class struggle is the highest expression of both class resistance and solidarity – one that leaves no room for pettiness, selfishness, or moral cynicism. It imparts to working-class youth a profound sense of social responsibility, discipline, and empathy forged through collective struggle. To preserve the middle-class caricature of youth as aimless, self-serving, and unreliable, it becomes essential that they not be shown to be confronted with class struggle.
This is precisely the path the filmmaker has chosen: By omitting any encounter with collective resistance, the film ensures that its protagonist remains trapped within a framework that validates bourgeois prejudices rather than illuminating social truth.
Portrayal sans analysis
‘Bahuchithawadiya’ shares traits with recent postmodern cinema that portrays decay but offers no analysis. These are not works that illuminate life in motion – they are snapshots of despair, stripped of context.
Compare this to Pathiraja’s ‘Ahas Gauwa’ (1974), where Wije’s life changes through his contact with the working class. That film ends with his participation in a trade union strike. Or Keerthisena’s ‘Mille Soya’ (2004), where youth longing for migration are portrayed with sympathy and depth. These films do not underestimate historical forces. In today’s society, gripped by deep crisis, a heightened degree of class resistance is not only inevitable but increasingly evident.
Commenting on ‘Take Me Somewhere Nice’ (2019) by Ena Sendijarević, David Walsh noted that many youth today are ‘in-between’ – disillusioned with the present and yet to find an alternative. His remark applies equally to Dewapriya. ‘Bahuchithawadiya’ captures uncertainty but not its source, nor its revolutionary potential.
Dewapriya is not without talent. His previous work in radio drama shows artistic promise. He has an eye for composition and a sensitivity to urban lives. But his current limitations reflect a narrow social perspective.
A work of art does not need to be optimistic – but it must be truthful. An artist should not only cognise life, but should attempt to partially lift the veil of future, when he is dissatisfied with today’s reality. He has to see it through the prism of an ideal ‘tomorrow’ and ‘show man in his ideal’. As A.K. Voronsky wrote, the best art “yearns for man drawn up to his full height.”
‘Bahuchithawadiya’ turns away from the real struggles of our time and offers a cold, cynical image of youth in crisis.
In the end, the film is not truly about youth, but about a social layer’s inability to comprehend youth – or to see in them not just despair, but the possibility of renewal.
(The writer is an Attorney-at-Law, a political activist, and a regular contributor to thesocialist.lk)
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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication