A Woman’s Film ?
It has been announced that Prasanna Vithanage’s latest film Akasa Kusum has been selected as Sri Lanka’s official entry to the 2010 Academy Awards (Oscars). The film has already won international accolades including the best Asian Film Award (co-shared with Iranian director Behnam Behzade’s Before the Burial) at the Third Granada International film festival in Spain, and a special jury mention at the Visoul Film Festival in France.
Malini Fonseka who plays the main role in the film also won the Silver Peacock for her portrayal of Sandya Rani at the 39th International Film Festival of India (IFFI) held in Goa. She has also been nominated as best female actor at the Asia Pacific Film Awards which will be held in Australia in November this year.
Casting Women
What is unique about Akasa Kusum from Cat’s Eye’s perspective is that it is the first film of late in the Sinhala cinema entirely dominated by women. There have been other films, notably Inoka Satyangani’s Sulang Kirilli, and Satyajith Maitipe’s yet to be released Bora Diya Pokuna both of which pivot around central female characters. But Akasa Kusum’s cast does not even list one major role for a male actor. Instead it reads like a who’s who of the most renowned female actors of the Sinhala stage and screen: Malini Fonseka, Nimmi Harasgama, Dilhani Ekanayake, Kaushalya Fernando, Jayani Senanayake and Samanalee Fonseka. It beats even Deepa Mehta’s Water in this respect, for Water had at least one male role worthy of a leading actor (John Abraham).
While a cast comprising entirely, or predominantly, of women is not essential for a film director to create a credible women’s world within a film, what is noteworthy is the emphasis in Akasa Kusum on an ageing woman whose glory days are over. It is rare in cinema to find serious, important roles for older women, and in this respect Vithanage has given cinema audiences something unique in the character of Sandya Rani (superbly played by Malini Fonseka). This role builds on, and complements the character of Violet (played by Nita Fernando) in Vithanage’s earlier film Pavuru Walalu (1977) which deftly portrayed the dilemma of a middle aged woman who has to deal with the consequences of a renewed love affair.
The Celluloid World
Akasa Kusum is also the result of Vithanage’s self-confessed compulsion to make a film based on his own professional world, i.e. the world of cinema. However his is not a tribute to film in the usual sense of the word, but more an exposé of the pressures on male and female actors (particularly the latter) to conform in their own lives to the celluloid images of themselves.
When the story begins, Sandya Rani’s acting days are over. She lives in a modest house with one female domestic aide (played by Jayani Senanayake). She rents out a spare room to younger actress friends, some of whom use it for illicit affairs. The film begins with a bust-up when one such actress, Shalika (Dilhani Ekanayake), is caught out by her husband.
It is not until later in the film that we learn that Sandya Rani herself has a dark secret of a different kind: she was already married, with a baby daughter, when she got her first acting break in films. As the film industry and its audiences of the time demanded that screen heroines measure up to their virginal screen roles even in real life, Sandya Rani abandons her young family and even denies her daughter’s existence in order to conform to the conventions of the industry in which its predominantly male producers call the shots. The impact of this decision comes to haunt her when Priya (played with her usual competence by Nimmi Harasgama) who is a professional night-club dancer enters the story. Priya is Sandya Rani’s abandoned daughter.
Women’s World
One of the main strands of the story is the female bonding that occurs in a world where the decisions are, by and large, taken by men who do not hesitate to set different standards for themselves. We see this bonding between Sandya Rani and her young friend Shalika, and in a different way between Sandya Rani and her domestic aide and sole household companion. In very different surroundings it is also evident between Priya and her best friend (played by Samanalee Fonseka).
The dominance and fickleness of men appear to be accepted as a fact of life by all the women characters in the film, who likewise accept that their problems are their own to resolve, irrespective of who caused them. Thus, although the acting is powerful without being histrionic, the way the women’s issues are handled in the story may not always be to the liking of all women. The film explores a world inhabited by women where women make choices and go about solving their own problems. But in doing so the film, and its women characters, absolve men of the responsibility of also having to work towards more gender equitable norms. This lack of any serious male accountability once again invites comparison with Deepa Mehta’s Water where there was at least one scene in which a feudal father and his radical son clash over their respective attitudes towards the treatment of women.
Closures
While the acting, haunting theme music by Lakshman Joseph, and production values of Akasa Kusum are of the high standard we have come to expect of a Prasanna Vithanage film, there are some nagging ambiguities, even weaknesses, which detract. To begin with, the title “Akasa kusum” or Flowers of the Sky does not seem to have any clear connection with the subject matter. Secondly, the credit sequence with a shadowy backdrop of a couple engaging in sex is gimmicky and lacks meaning particularly as the film is not primarily about sexual relationships but exploitation and betrayal – and it is not always on sexual exploitation and betrayal either.
The weakest part of the film, however, is its ending. Surely one feels the climax of this film should be a face-to-face confrontation between the mother and her estranged daughter. The meeting may be acrimonious or bittersweet, it may end in reconciliation or final parting, but it must happen. Indeed the film appears to be shaping up to such an encounter when Sandya Rani finally abandons the aloofness of her retirement home and goes scouring the nightspots of Colombo to find the girl.
But it is not to be. Suddenly, the director pulls back. There is no meeting, just a precious gift and a letter of reconciliation from the daughter who, we presume, is granted a merciful oblivion from her degraded city/nightclub life. As a result, the queen of the cinema does not have to confront the flotsam from her real life, although she remains haunted by this absent daughter.
Overall, while the film attempts to deal with some of the crucial cultural and professional problems in the cinema industry, it nevertheless ends up stereotyping virtually all the women characters except, perhaps, that of Sandya Rani. What is most disturbing is the film’s subtext with its apparent warning to all women who transgress the bounds of sexuality. Either these women end up old and lonely, hungering for public adulation; or they are emotionally exploited, deprived of a ‘normal’ family life, or end up pregnant, with HIV/ Aids and dead. These options do not admit to the many strong and empowered female actors present within the Sri Lankan film industry itself. After all, the sheer talent and high quality of their performances even within the film proves this to be the case.
We are left at the end, therefore, with a view that acting as a serious and committed art / profession for women is not a possibility. Rather the emphasis falls on the superficial glamour, sexualization, public adulation, over indulgences and commercialization which seem to blind these women. Even the multiple facets of Sandya Rani’s character does not permit an alternative perspective of a stronger woman – less burdened by the weight of social norms and so, less emotionally needy for public adulation. For all of these reasons‑‑and because Vithanage is a film maker we admire ‑‑ Akasa Kusum is a film which demands our attention, not least because it provokes us to think of how its women’s roles could have been re-imagined.
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Cat's Eye - UNCUT 