The Sri Lankan film-maker Lester James Peries, who has died aged 99, was, like his Indian contemporary Satyajit Ray, more highly regarded abroad than in his native country. His career was dominated by a constant struggle to obtain finance and, during 50 years directing features, he completed only 18 films. These were described by his friend and champion Lindsay Anderson as “works of Chekhovian grace”.
In 1970, I had the good fortune to program the inaugural seasons for the National Film Theatre’s NFT2 screens, with the brief that they should reflect important, yet, neglected areas of cinema. Among those seasons was a modest one devoted to five features by Peries. Only a quintet, but enough to convince those who saw them in London – and a little later at the Paris Cinémathèque and the New York Museum of Modern Art – that here was a director of special character, not least for the masterly, Changes in the Village (1963).
Some years later, on leaving the NFT, with neat symmetry I was able to program the first complete retrospective of Lester’s work and chair his elegant question-and-answer session. By then, his output had grown to 14 features and it was possible to write an introduction that not only placed him alongside Ray, but compared his qualities of restraint and observation with Yasujirō Ozu and placed his humanity alongside that of Jean Renoir.
Even so, he was criticized for a seeming lack of concern with rigid politics and social conditions. In reply he once wrote: “My major preoccupation has been with the Sri Lanka family in the process of dissolution. For me, the family has been the microcosm of the social, political and economic changes in the world outside.”
Son of Ann (nee Jayasuria) and James Peries, he was born into a comfortably off Roman Catholic family in Colombo, in what was then Ceylon. He was pressured by his father, a doctor, to train for the priesthood, but he gave up his studies after a year and turned to writing about theatre and cinema. Having family ties in the UK, he moved there in 1947 and worked for six years as a correspondent for the Times of Ceylon. During this period he made several short films including, Farewell to Childhood (1950).
He returned home to join the government film unit, then headed by the British documentarist Ralph Keene, and by the time of his first feature film had directed 12 shorts in the UK and Sri Lanka. His debut was thus a confident one and an astonishing rebuttal of all but a handful of indigenous films that had preceded it. The general rule – as his early biographer Philip Coorey wrote in The Lonely Artist (1970) – was for “a concoction of 10 songs, five dances and three fights all shaken together for three hours”. In marked contrast, The Line of Destiny (1956) was a gentle portrait of a young boy who becomes a village healer – with tragic results. Although well received at Cannes, it failed commercially, as did Peries’ second film, The Message (1960), and he continued to work as a journalist.
In 1963, he managed to finance the more mature and accessible film which secured his reputation, Changes in the Village (Gamperaliya), and throughout the 1960s and 70s worked steadily. There was another vivid portrait of village life, Between Two Worlds (Delovak Athara) (1966), a version of a Buddhist morality play, The Yellow Dress – Ransalu (1967) and Silence of the Heart (Golu Hadawatha) (1969), his greatest commercial success. This bittersweet love story was followed by Five Acres of Land – Akkara paha (1972), an austerely dignified work that showed his mastery. The next work is widely considered to be among the greatest of all films from Asia. The Treasure – Nidhanaya (1972) told the tragic story of a man obsessed by the notion of discovering treasure. He kills a young girl, only to realize that she is the ‘treasure’ he has long sought.
A Certain Look (1972) told of a man so ugly that even his mother acknowledges that “only a blind girl could love him”. When his wife’s sight is restored, she is at first repelled and runs away, only to return. Their love is gradually reborn. As in the majority of his films, Peries imbues a simple – almost naïve – tale with humanity and compassion.
Peries made two attempts at a wider international audience, the first a British co-production. The God King (1974), starring Oliver Tobias and Leigh Lawson and set in fifth-century Ceylon, told a colourful and bloody story, but somehow seemed a compromise to his admirers. It proved a fraught production despite a comparatively large budget. He fared better with a 1980 adaptation of Leonard Woolf’s novel, Village in the Jungle, ravishingly photographed by his long-term collaborator, Willie Blake.
His other works included the complex and beautiful White Flowers for the Dead (1977), a delicately observed study of a couple who have grown apart over the years. In a marked change of mood, he filmed another historical film, Brave Peeran Appu (1979), set in 1848 and foretelling the end of British rule.
Although he made three further films during the next decade, End of an Era (1983) proved aptly named.
His wife and frequent editor Sumitra Gunawardena, whom he had married in 1964, had emerged as a director of feature films and television drama and in the 90s she was appointed Sri Lanka’s Ambassador in Paris. Peries also moved for the duration to France, where he was highly regarded.
After some years of relative inactivity, Peries returned to direction with The Sunset (1995) and more surprisingly and excitingly made a major comeback in 2002. Mansion by the Lake, loosely based on Chekhov’s, The Cherry Orchard, was invited to the Cannes film festival but was not released in Britain, despite its success in France and elsewhere.
Peries directed Elegy for a Mother (2006) at the age of 86, but unusually this had no input from him on the screenplay.
By this time Peries’ honours and life achievement awards were numerous, among them two of unusual note: the road in which he had long lived was renamed after him; and on his Birthday in 2002 a million 3.50 rupee stamps were struck in his honour. A book, Lester on Lester, was published in 2007.
He is survived by his wife.