Tony Ranasinghe,in full flow – 2

By Uditha Devapriya

This is the second in a series of candid vignettes about Tony Ranasinghe.Something curious happens to actors when they age: they become parodies of themselves. Nowhere is this truer than the American film industry. When Kirk Douglas tries to man up in The Fury, one of his last great performances, he tries to pass off as a Spartacus, reminding us of who he once was. Some actors pass the years gracefully, like Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City. Many don’t. They remind us of who they were while forgetting who they are. Even the best among them tend to flounder: that is why the later Brando is not as good as the early Brando. Stars like Clint Eastwood play it smart: they end their acting careers and turn to the director’s chair.

This almost never happens in Sri Lanka. Gamini Fonseka’s best late performance has to be in Sumitra Peries’s Loku Duwa. Here he threatens to overreach himself, by embodying what we associated with him and overturning our notions of him. We are shocked when we hear him speak: he’s slouchy and he’s strange. He doesn’t talk, he mumbles, like the upstart businessman he is. But there’s a scene right at the beginning where he fumbles around with a cigarette lighter in a Mercedes-Benz, right next to the Kalutara Bodhiya, where he doesn’t speak a word, and still makes us aware that it’s him we are seeing. Like the prima ballerina who never ages, Gamini Fonseka remained who he was; when he sings with Nadeeka Gunasekara, it’s almost a throwback to those old films where he paired with Malini Fonseka and Geetha Kumarasinghe.

With Vijaya Kumaratunga the issue wasn’t that he didn’t want to age, but that he couldn’t afford to. The only two real performances that feature him as an ageing patriarch are, not coincidentally, in two “serious” pictures: Sumitra Peries’s Ganga Addara and Vasantha Obeyesekere’s Kadapathaka Chaya. In Kadapathaka Chaya he’s cast against type, as the villain. There have been rumours that Kumaratunga’s family were wary of him accepting the role, because he was at the peak of his career – Nombara 17 came around the same time Obeyesekere’s film did – and because he was putting everything he had into his political career. It won for him the only Sarasaviya Award he got in his entire career – the first and the last, since it would also be his last role. Like Fonseka, he raged against the passing years and pulled it off. Both were maturing, but both wanted to retain their youth.

Tony Ranasinghe is probably the only actor in Sri Lanka who showed that he was evolving and maturing. Fonseka tried hard not to – except in films like Yuganthaya and Sagarayak Meda, where he had to be serious – and Joe Abeywickrema didn’t – again, except in films like Loku Duwa and Awaragira, where he played a less comic tune. Ranasinghe’s best years were spent in the 1960s, the decade of flower power and youth resistance. Hailing from Ape Kattiya, which specialised in the Angry Young Man plays that British playwrights like Joe Orton had staged, he took to the character of the alienated youth like a duck to water. In Delovak Athara he more or less played the role he would play until the end of the decade. He typified it in the same way Fonseka typified the tough goodhearted rowdy in Chandiya. Yet he couldn’t escape the passing years. As they passed, he had to change.

Because he was cast as the villain, Ranasinghe didn’t ring true in Ran Salu. Even then, he’s hesitant and he fumbles around: right after impregnating the woman who dotes on him, he tells her that he’s leaving her, that he’ll look after her. Yet even in this scene – in a hospital – he can’t get the words out. In the previous sequence he contemplates abandoning her for his new fiancée, an heiress. The heiress gets him to stop thinking about the girl with whom he has fathered a child. If Ranasinghe couldn’t really play the role of the heartless teenager, it’s because he could not fully let go of the tragic romantic figure he had embodied so well. Perhaps because he doesn’t ring true, the sequence where he tells the girl, played by Anula Karunathilake, that he’s leaving her is awkward, almost out of place with the rest of the film. It’s like Bette Davis playing the vamp in the 1940s: it doesn’t fit his profile.

Soon that profile began to change. His outline is the same in Parasathumal, which marks the last time he played the tragic romantic figure in a major film. Yet he is changing here too. There’s a sequence in Parasathumal where, having discovered that the man who has hired him to look after his manor – played by Gamini Fonseka – is going after the woman he loves, he takes up his gun in a fit of anger and traipses through the woods. The camera cuts from long shot to close-up, zooming into his angry face. There’s not so much anger on it as there is frustration. The gun symbolises everything he wants to put out – it symbolises the macho bravado he is conspicuously lacking. Halfway through he gives up, and turns the other way around. That turnaround is predictable, and characteristic.

With Hanthane Kathawa, he officially ended this phase in his career. Hanthane Kathawa, like Parasathumal, pits Ranasinghe’s character against a man vying for the affections of the woman he loves and courts. He has his supporters, like Amarasiri Kalansuriya, but whether it’s an election to a student body or a singing contest on top of the Hanthane Hills, he soon betrays his lack of masculine bravado. Henry Jayasena goes through a similar ordeal in G. D. L. Perera’s Dahasak Sithuvili – he recites a “serious” tune at a party, only to be upended by his rival, who sings “Sathutu Vilai” and enlivens everyone around him. Hanthane Kathawa ends with Ranasinghe finally realising that he can’t have the girl he wants: she goes into a cave with the other man, played by Vijaya Kumaratunga. Ranasinghe is full of despair, and is stung by her betrayal, but instead of throwing a tantrum, he turns around.

Beneath the sensitive façade, Ranasinghe’s characters had an air of carelessness about them. “They are most alive (and most appealing) because they don’t conceive of the day after tomorrow,” Pauline Kael once observed of Jean-Luc Godard’s characters. This is very true of the characters in Dharmasena Pathiraja’s films – particularly in Para Dige – but it is also true of Tony Ranasinghe’s protagonists. As the villain he always makes himself out as a suave, self-confident planner, the man who knows what will happen tomorrow or the day after that. But as the tragic romantic he had no plans. You don’t really feel the time flowing in Delovak Athara as much as you do in, say, Gamperaliya, because Ranasinghe doesn’t have a plan. Fittingly, on the morning after the accident in Peries’s film, Nissanka gets up, listens to the ticking of the clock, and shuts it. He doesn’t want to think ahead.

Unfortunately or fortunately for him, he was growing up, and so were his characters. He was caught between two worlds – the reckless, tragic foolishness of his early years and the more serious outlook of his later years. He could neither be reckless nor wise. Yet his profile and outline were changing considerably: from the lanky, thin youth he had once been, he had now become stouter, his hair dishevelled beyond recognition. His two best films from this period, Duhulu Malak and Ahasin Polawata, no longer have him as the lover: he is instead the husband. But the dilemma is the same: he craves their love, but because of his doubts or their indiscretions he is reduced to crying and raging. You couldn’t have imagined Gamini Fonseka in this situation because he wouldn’t have cared: he would have got the woman to come back to him. Vijaya wouldn’t have cared either, because his women would never have left him. With Ranasinghe the situation was more complicated.

Films like Duhulu Malak and Ahasin Polawa have their weaknesses and shortcomings. Yet they are saved by Ranasinghe’s performance. As Regi Siriwardena once observed, Ahasin Polawa, unlike Nidhanaya, takes no effort to ground the jealous imaginings and obsessions of its protagonist in anything substantive. His feelings are self-contained, a far cry from Willie Abeynayake’s in Nidhanaya. Yet Ranasinghe does something no other actor could have done: he makes us empathise with these feelings and emotions. A lesser actor would have lost it. The last scene in Duhulu Malak, of the husband imagining himself shooting his wife, plays out rather falsely. It’s an emotional rollercoaster ride. And yet, as the husband, Ranasinghe gets us to understand his torment. In one sense he had grown in these years, far away from the tragic lover he had been playing earlier. Yet in another he had not. Caught between two worlds, he had failed, even by now, to get out of either.

The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com