“Dadayama” and the Sinhala middle – cinema

By Uditha Devapriya

In a long, thoughtful article on Vasantha Obeyesekere in the Daily Mirror two years ago (“Versatile Filmmaker Vasantha Obeysekera’s Dadayama“, August 6, 2022), D. B. S. Jeyaraj remembers going to watch Dadayama with Ajith Samaranayake for the first time. This was 1983, a few months before the riots; political turmoil had become a fact of life, but people went in large numbers to theatres. Dadayama was no exception.

“When we went to the Regal Theatre, the show had already started running to a full house. Furthermore, tickets to the next show were also sold out. There were long lineups of ticket holders waiting to see the next show of the film. The chances of seeing the film that evening or night were extremely remote.”

The most obvious reason for the full and packed audiences, of course, was the experience Obeyesekere’s film had offered spectators. In the context of the Sri Lankan cinema, there had not been a film like it before. It represented not only the peak of the Sinhala cinema of the 1980s, but as importantly, the high point of the middlebrow-masscult culture of that decade. By now, the divide between box-office success and critical appeal that had prevailed and, in a way, defined the cinema in the 1960s and 1970s had faded away. What was once considered as lowbrow entertainment had become middlebrow art. The old middlebrow, by contrast, had become the new highbrow.

Against this backdrop, what Vasantha Obeyesekere did was to subvert the tropes of popular cinema, using the motifs of the mainstream as a vehicle for serious themes. Obeyesekere figured in among a group of ambitious filmmakers – among them, H. D. Premaratne and Vijaya Dharma Sri – who had emerged in the 1970s thanks to the policies of the National Film Corporation, and had taken it on themselves to question the conventions and frontiers of their medium. In doing so, they carved a space for themselves.

Dadayama was far from the first film that exemplified this trend. Nor was it Obeyesekere’s first work to take a step in that direction. Before Dadayama, he made Palagetiyo. And before Palagetiyo, he made Diyamanthi, a slick neo-Hitchcockian thriller which steered clear of the song-and-dance sequences of mainstream Sinhala films, yet, somehow, managed to keep audiences entertained. Diyamanthi, in turn, followed a long line of films that began with H. D. Premaratne’s Sikuruliya and Apeksha, and Vijaya Dharma Sri’s Duhulu Malak.

For all intents and purposes, these were films that examined “serious” themes, political or otherwise. Yet they did so while featuring some of the most melodramatic, contrived storylines that could ever be concocted. Sikuruliya, for instance, borrows its plot from the Ummagga Jatakaya and every other trope of Sinhala romance films. Yet, crucially, it subverts those tropes. In a typical Sinhala film, the forlorn girl – played here by the highly versatile Swineetha Weerasinghe – would not take it upon herself to elope with another man on the day of her wedding: she would invariably wait for someone to rescue her. Yet here, she does what she pleases with various men who enter her life.

Apeksha takes this a step ahead by confronting social class, a theme that had never been addressed with any modicum of intelligence in a mainstream Sinhala film. In popular Sinhala cinema, class served as a backdrop, or at best a prop. The rich man would invariably be the villain, the poor boy the hero, and the (almost always rich) girl would be saved by the latter from the clutches of the former. Apeksha ends on that note: it culminates in a predictable fistfight between hero and villain. But the rich, depraved villain does not entirely become a villain: at certain points, such as when he visits a singer at a bar he has fallen in love with, we feel the director is trying to humanise him.

Vijaya Dharma Sri’s Duhulu Malak tackles a more controversial and difficult theme: adultery. As the film scholar Laleen Jayamanne notes, Duhulu Malak became “perhaps the first Sri Lankan film to present adultery in a manner that makes it seem visually pleasurable.” This was no mean achievement, and it cannot be undermined. However, Dharma Sri worked at a time when adultery could not be presented in any visually pleasing way without making concessions to the box-office. For that reason, Duhulu Malak has the cake and eats it too: it sympathises with the woman who faces a stark choice between her husband and her lover, yet satisfies the moral brigade by making her return to her husband.

Parithyagaya

Both Premaratne and Dharma Sri spent the rest of their careers making films that addressed one difficult theme after another, within an essentially commercial framework. To their credit, this formula never backfired on them. Premaratne, for one, managed to make a series of hits in the most unlikely and impossible settings.

Two of his films, Devani Gamana and Palama Yata, were released in that interregnum between the ethnic riots and the second JVP insurrection. Both performed well at the box-office. Then, in 1997, when the trauma of the insurrection had begun to fade away, he made Visidela, which confronted the insurgency as in unfolds in an otherwise quaint, nondescript Sinhala village.

It is against this backdrop that one should note Obeyesekere’s achievement. Obeyesekere fundamentally belongs to the middle-cinema space, but his films are not of the same mould as Premaratne’s and Dharma Sri’s. Premaratne and Dharma Sri ostensibly steered clear of political themes, though of course one can argue that there is nothing apolitical about the themes they explored.

Obeyesekere, however, is more of a political radical: he questions norms and conventions by first making us idealise them before shattering all illusions we have of them. In this regard, his treatment of class in Palagetiyo is different to Premaratne’s approach to it in Apeksha: unlike the latter, in which the two lovers reconcile, in Palagetiyo the romance eventually takes second place to the harsh realities of class.

As I mentioned earlier, Dadayama was far from the first film which epitomised the middle-cinema space of the 1970s and 1980s. Yet it was unprecedented in its own way. For the first time in a Sinhala film, we are seeing tropes of the popular cinema being presented before our eyes, only to be shattered like the shards of glass that rain down on the camera and the screen in that final encounter between the protagonist and antagonist.

Obeyesekere made sure to include his actors in this scheme. To give the best example, he conjures Irangani Serasinghe out of the blue, presents her as the sweet, idealised mother-type so strongly associated with her, and then destroys that image of her by making her a chain-smoking brothel owner. During a conversation I had with her 10 years ago, Serasinghe recalled being showered by letters from outraged fans: “They all asked me, ‘Why did you take on that role, why did you set such a bad example for our children?’” She seemed visibly distraught. Obeyesekere’s ruse had worked.

It goes without saying that Vasantha Obeyesekere never again reached the heights he did with Dadayama. Kadapathaka Chaya comes a close second, but it is too long, and at one level derivative of Dadayama, to rise on its own. His last great work, Dorakada Marawa, bears comparisons with Dadayama and Palagetiyo. Yet by the time of its release, the Sinhala cinema had moved on to its next phase, marked by the entry of a new and different – a more politically inclined – generation of directors. Premaratne and Dharma Sri continued to make films. Yet they had to give way to a new order.

For better or worse, the Sinhala middle-cinema of the 1970s and 1980s no longer exists. Most of its best and brightest purveyors, including not just Obeyesekere, Dharma Sri, and Premaratne, but also to a considerable extent Sumitra Peries, have long passed away. Yet in that interregnum, that middle-cinema space provided both directors and audiences a chance to confront, address – and even resolve – some of the more pressing issues from that time.

One wonders whether the present culture in Sri Lanka – with its emphasis on low budgets, on avant-gardism, on lavish funding – has made us less appreciative of the cinema’s potential to raise awareness of important issues within mainstream audiences.

Perhaps what we need to do is to return to that earlier mode of filmmaking. In doing so, we can redefine, even revolutionise, the Sinhala cinema, tapping into its potential as the most popular and the most populist of the arts in this country. Films are, essentially, communal experiences. What the likes of Premaratne and Obeyesekere taught us is that this does not preclude directors from examining serious themes, and that mass audiences can be made to respond to them – as the 1970s and 1980s illustrated well enough.

Uditha Devapriya is a writer, researcher, and analyst based in Sri Lanka who contributes to a number of publications on topics such as history, art and culture, politics, and foreign policy. He can be reached at .