The way the movies get their names is interesting. I wrote about Iraj Weerarathna’s Cleopatra You Tube movie arguing that it was promoting rape and violence against women. I wrote that the name Cleopatra given to the main character of the video had no connection to the 1st century BC Queen of Egypt, the most famous Cleopatra of this world. I am neither Colombo citizen nor a man who thinks that names of night clubs of the city are important knowledge.
The way the movie ‘28’ of Prasanna Jayakodi has got its name is rather interesting, not because it is just a number. This number denotes two main factors. One is the number of days the moon takes to rotate one round around Earth. That number is exactly equal to the number of days the moon takes to turn around herself. Therefore, the people on Earth always see the same side of the moon on which a rabbit inhabits, as said in Sinhala folklore. If the earthmen want to see the other side of the moon they have to travel to outer space.
Life is same. If we want to see the other side of any story we must move out of the space of sentimental gravity. Art is the medium of travel for that.
In Prasanna’s movie, the main character Suddi is 38 years old, so the name ‘28’ is not her age. It is the number of days in woman’s menstruation cycle.
One may argue that cinema cannot change the society. But a film that targets changing the human behaviours through education while expression and artistry are given prominence can be considered socialist cinema.
In a time, Sinhala cinema of Sri Lanka is divided as movies for viewers and movies for awards, Prasanna Jayakodi takes up the challenge of taking the artistic cinema to people and also to educate people on a highly controversial subject in the local context.
“This movie reveals the fears and suspicions in the society in terms of sexuality, an issue which is not openly discussed in Sri Lankan society. I tried to get the characters speak the issues that prevail among themselves which are created by themselves through the limitations on sexuality,” Jayakodi said in a newspaper interview on ’28.’
The main two themes Prasanna Jayakodi deals are the shortcomings in sexual and reproductive health education and the cynical attitudes on sexuality, two factors that complement each other.
The same theme was discussed decades ago in Sri Lanka’s first sexual and reproductive health education feature film ‘Yuwathipathi’ directed by Amaranath Jayathilaka and produced by Family Planning Association.
Has the paradigm shifted even after a number of decades? Following monologue by Suddi in the movie ‘28’ tells the story in a nutshell.
“When the school text books were given in grade nine, we first turned to the lesson on reproduction on the last pages. Now I am 38 years old but still that lesson has not been taught to me.”
Prasanna highlights cinematically that one major reason for the misery of a section of Sri Lankan men and women is shortcomings in sexual and reproductive health education and the cynical attitudes on sexuality. The viewer is tempted to rethink about life.
Prasanna uses the popular surrealism without making the movie a crossword puzzle. Suddi is dead but she speaks to viewers walking among the drawers in the dirty mortuary wearing a night dress. She speaks of the woes of women who suffer mostly due to the above mentioned factors. The movie is very dramatic. In one scene, the sounds of the young women in cramped city boarding houses are heard via the drawers of the mortuary.
Suddi tells only a part of her story. We have to imagine the rest. Prasanna does not tell us how Suddi was killed. But does it really matter? The way the assassination took place may be important to news journalism. But Prasanna is apparently saying that whatever the method used, the violence against women is same.
The untold story is symbolized in one deep, painful and prolonged audio track of Suddi’s wail played in the background of a frame in which her legal husband Abasiri poses. It is one of the iconic uses of audio in a Sinhala movie, I think.
“We spent the honeymoon on the shaky wooden bed of the front room of my husband’s ancestral home. Having blown off the lamp and taken the mattress down, we started action but it was the daybreak then,” Suddi recalls her marriage.
Prasanna Jayakodi does not restrict his film in the limits of popular feminism. He is sensitive to the man’s side of the tragic story too.
“Abasiri saw my nude for the first time after 15 years. Unfortunately, it was on the stone bed of the mortuary,” Suddi tells a big story in simple words.
The film starts with a scene in which Abasiri is working in a mine underground. His assistant, a young nephew, reads a book in which the women’s traditional 64 tricks are described. Traditional communities do not take them as mere literature.
But Abasiri is the hero of this movie who takes up challenges and sees through the life. The struggle of the poor man who tries to 'smuggle' the body of his wife which he found out after 15 years to his village and the conflicts he comes across create drama.
“We must not insult Suddi,” Abasiri repeats. It is the voice of a hero in the orthodox community in which the woman is usually blamed for evils of men. She is often closely and lustfully watched, laughed, jeered and tortured. However, the traditional communities have all the wrongs which they identify as bad.
“A living man cannot speak of truth in our country but I am telling the truth,” dead Suddi says. That is the cinematographer’s voice.
The frame in which the father-in-law is standing near the bathroom out of Abasiri’s house showing back to the camera is a very cinematic shot. Suddi has to leave the house because the father-in-law was caught peeping into the bathroom through the fanlight. We, as viewers, can see the plastic shower in the bathroom through the same fanlight. Suddi is branded offender afterall because she had bathed in that private space naked. Certain communities in Sri Lanka still do not understand the privacy properly.
Prasanna Jayakodi’s movie ‘28’ portrays the misery of village and urban lives of downtrodden masses in each frame with subtle brushstrokes. We see men peeing in dark corners, smoking cannabis, drinking cheap illegally distilled alcohol, cheating fellow men, prostitution, homosexuality and other evils. Music of the film underlines this pathos.
Before Suddi’s body is taken out for burial, Abasiri, in a surreal mood, asks the spectators to go home because he is about to close all doors to let the body kept alone for a couple of minutes, as customs require. But Suddi has a message to give us before that. To know it, watch the movie ’28.’
