The Sinhala film “28” won awards for best picture, best director, best screenplay, best editing and best cinematography for 2017 at the recent Cargills Sarasaviya Film Awards 2018. Amali Mallawaarachchi reviews the film, well received by critics and audiences alike, following its latest string of victories at the Sarasaviya Film Awards.
If French Philosopher Michel Foucault was to watch “28”, he would have hailed Prasanna Jayakody for condensing the “Victorian bourgeois” into a 90 minute motion picture. This was the initial thought that came to my mind as I finished watching 28, the movie that has won two international awards and many local ones this year.
The awards included, Best Director and Best Actor awards at the SAARC Film Festival 2018 and Best Film, Best Director, Best Screen Play and Best Editing awards at the Sixth Derana Film Awards 2018. It won the NETPAC Jury Award for the Best Asian Film at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in 2014. It also received a special Jury Mention at Bled Film Festival, the same year. The movie was also nominated for the Asia Pacific Screen Award for Best Screen Play and Best Performance by an actor.
Foucault, theorizing how Victorian values and Puritanism changed the dynamics of sexuality in the Western world, says, “Sexuality was carefully confined; it moved into the home. The conjugal family took custody of it and absorbed it into the serious function of reproduction. On the subject of sex, silence became the rule.” The same Puritanical values accompanied by Colonialism reached Africa, Asia, South Asia, India and of course, this island nation, and flourished on our soils. Robert Knox wrote that in Ceylon, society was relatively flexible in family life, with a high degree of informality in divorce and separation but soon after British rule became established, such family and marriage laws were altered. Absence of passion, modesty, virtue, female piety and sincerity are some of the Victorian values that easily found their way into existing Sinhala Buddhist tradition, Knox wrote.
Farcical lives
Prasanna Jayakody, some good two centuries after, brings forth the fate of the very “conjugal family”, the “cultured woman (and man)” and the society built upon these Victorian values, mirroring our cultured farcical lives. He gives us a ride in a wreck of an Ice cream van topped with a coffin, in a path of miseries: sexual repression, sexual exploitation, trauma and emotional desolation.
The film’s plot revolves around a raped and murdered sex worker, Suddhi, a woman who has left her marriage and her home owing to shaming by the villagers. Her husband Abasiri and his relative Mani take it upon them to bring the dead body of Suddhi from the city back to the village for a ‘decent burial.’ Due to financial difficulties, Abasiri and Mani trick Lennin, a driver of an ice cream van into carrying Suddhi’s coffin back to the village.
Cinema can be considered as the strongest medium of expression in depicting psychology behind human sexuality. Jayakody exquisitely exploits this medium, incorporating his criticism of society into subtle, filmic images and scenes. He breaks free from the cultural restrains and projects human sexuality and the repercussions of constraining the very same in this fragmented story. With the psychological basis upon which he places his cinematic narration, 28 shifts between the symbolic, the real and the imaginary layers making it a complex depiction of emotional wretchedness against social bourgeois. The surreal narration of the dead Suddhi transfers the discomfort and the emotional suffocation felt by the living characters to the audience. Jayakody decrypts anxieties, desires, unresolved emotions, guilt and other psychological complexities into persuasive scenes and narrations throughout the movie.
Symbolism, subtle as it is, plays a strong part in the movie. The film 28 is a symbol of cultural idiosyncrasies which have paved the way to sexual frustration, crime and emotional hollowness. The title of the movie depicts the female menstruation cycle, symbolizing the natural order against the culturally constructed society. A mundane addition to an ordinary life may be, ‘the bathroom’ which was a recurring symbol that haunted the lives of Suddhi and Abasiri. Suddhi says, it was the ‘first in the village’ hinting at the modernism creeping into the lives of the villagers. The bathroom walls counter the villagers’ effort to have a glimpse of Suddhi’s body covered in a traditional bath robe. According to Suddhi’s narration, her father-in-law peeked into the bathroom while she was bathing and it is hinted that she has been vocal about the harassment. Ironically, her husband’s family found fault with her for bathing naked inside the bathroom. It is worthwhile to extend our imagination into what ‘has happened’ in contrast to what ‘could have happened’ if Suddhi kept silent about the harassment.
Another symbol that deeply struck me is the handbag that belonged to Suddhi. The handbag in which she has been carrying all her secrets and bitter-sweet memories is in the open following her death. Her handbag is no more than her life, different people peeping in, giving her no privacy. The ownerless handbag exposes the frailty of Suddhi’s existence which stirs our sympathies and makes her character very much relatable.
Critical stance
The Director’s employment of juxtaposition to build up intensity in a backdrop of dark humour is noteworthy. The most evident one is the ice cream van transporting a coffin with a dead body in it. In the local culture, food and dead bodies are not associated with each other. As a tradition, food is not prepared in a house where a dead body is kept. With this boundary-pushing placement Jayakody has craftily maintained his critical stance while elusively generating tension.
The juxtaposition of morbid elements with humorous ones underscoring the futility of life is also an inherent characteristic of black comedy, the structure on which the Director has set his story. Magical realism also contributes to the structural composition of 28. The film is filled with dark humour, farce and low comedy, and according to Jayakody, these helped him to relieve tension and keep the audience engaged.
The compelling scene where Abasiri repeatedly smells the perfume of Suddhi touched a raw nerve, unsettling me as a viewer. Technically, a screenwriter usually employs only sight and sound in writing. However, the Director-Screenwriter has successfully employed the faculty of scent in the scene where Abasiri smells Suddhi’s perfume in the mortuary.
Abasiri’s intense reaction to the naked body of his long lost wife, whose nakedness he has never seen before, perhaps was triggered by the same scent he inhaled. It is evident that Jayakody had the edge, with renowned actor Mahendra Perera by his side to execute this scene, because the only exception to the sight and sound rule is the performance of an actor. If anyone wonders why SARRC Film Festival 2018 awarded Best Direction and Best Actor awards to film 28, I believe this particular scene justifies it best.
We live in a society where sexual harassment is justified against the length of a skirt and during which time of the day a woman was victimized. Jayakody in many instances leaves strong silent criticism of the social double standards when dealing with the idea of rape. For instance, Suddhi has been raped and murdered, but no one seems to be interested in investigating.
Her body is abandoned, her handbag, which should have been an evidence of a crime scene, is simply handed over to Abasiri. The social treatment of rape and murder of an average woman in contrast to the same violence inflicted upon a sex worker is evidently different. In another monologue where Suddhi describes the villagers hooting at her, says that they only remembered the part where she bathed naked, not the part where her father-in-law peeped into her personal space. It is a subtle highlight of the way our society isolates the act of intercourse, physical violence and emotional trauma involved in a rape. People are only interested in “how” the act was done. The tractor driver who welcomes Abasiri back home along with the coffin, mouths the same attitude, “We read in the newspaper how Suddhi was murdered.” he says. I would have failed as a journalist if I couldn’t decipher the Director’s swift criticism of crime reporting ethics that have gone astray at present.
Decent burial
What ignited me as a viewer the most is the way 28’s characters are depicted, especially, Abasiri and Lennin.It is evident that Abasiri and Lenin both had a relationship with Suddhi that transcends the physical boundaries. At one point, Lenin asks Abasiri who Suddhi is, and the latter replies, it is a question he should ask Suddhi. We as the audience ask who Suddhi was to Lennin, probably a question we should again ask Suddhi.
These two undefined bonds work together to give a decent burial to Suddhi, giving us hope that humanity will survive against all odds.
At present, when art has become a form of escapism, a fantasy or a utopia where people demand to experience what they don’t have, Jayakody throws our very own realities into our faces. If some chose to turn on the denial mode to this cinematic rebellion, I believe, one should treat them with empathy.
However, 28 has superseded its controversies, presenting itself as a unique totality. It reminds me of Anthropologist Maurice Godelier’s words, “it is not sexuality which haunts society, but society is what actually haunts the body’s sexuality.”