My 'reading' of the film is that it is mainly a criticism of the use of children by the terror organization. Even when Kamalani's self-immolation is demanded, the equally pitiable but more outrageously exploited victim is the unborn child (because, if it is merely a young woman they need for the mission, any other young woman would do; but here Kamalani qualifies for the mission because her pregnancy is an essential part of the camouflage, so diabolically planned by terror agents)._________________________
by Rohana Wasala
(May 23, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Having seen Thushara Peiris' Prabhakaran I felt that it is a film worth seeing, and even writing about. Though the adoption of the name Prabhakaran seemed a mere advertising gimmick before my viewing of it, it now reveals itself to me as a well-thought-out choice of a title that gives an ironical twist to the usual connotations of that name, which are due to its association with the leader of the most ruthless terror outfit in the world. That name is quite appropriate for the film in terms of the central concern of Peiris' cinematic tour de force. Though the description tour de force might seem somewhat of an exaggeration, the fact remains that Peiris , as a young film-maker, has made a conscientious attempt to artistically communicate, as best he could, a deeply felt experience through his chosen medium. My point is that though Prabhakaran is obviously not of the highest quality it displays signs of informed effort on the part of its author to turn out a good film.
Prabhakaran is not at all about the terrorist boss of that name. He is only a menacing presence in the background, which is occasionally invoked to exact obedience from those serving him under coercion. The film is based on an internal division in the terror organization between the bigoted leadership and the free thinking young disillusioned with its terror tactics.
Kamalani and her younger brother Prabhakaran are children of ethnically mixed parentage (father Tamil, mother Sinhalese) . They live in a so-called border village as members of a mixed community. Having lost their parents in their childhood to communal violence, they are brought up in an orphanage. Subsequently, Kamalani secretly joins the LTTE's suicide squad known as the Black Tiger Unit. She also gets her brother enlisted in the rebel movement. She is forced to marry Piyasoma, a young Sinhalese. The terror outfit tries to use both Prabhakaran and Kamalani in their campaign of terror through subjecting them to a kind of brainwashing about the necessity of avenging the murder of their parents. But when they see that it is poor people like themselves on both sides who get killed in communal violence, they lose faith in the terror outfit. Despite traumatic memories from the past, they do not now relish their part in rebel violence from which, however, they can't extricate themselves under the circumstances.
Kamalani becomes pregnant. The child inside her and her husband's love give her new hope. Prabhakaran, who is a child combatant, rebels against the repression of the terror group.
Isolated and stranded between their natural human passion for life and love, freedom and fulfillment on the one hand, and on the other, the relentless coercion of the terrorists they struggle heroically against their fate in their own way while events move inexorably to their tragic end.
The drama is unfolded against a rural, jungle setting. The time is the present time when Tamils, Sinhalese, and others coexist as peaceably as ever, despite the alleged ethnic conflict raging around them in the name of which a small section of the population is fighting a terrorist war against the government. The incidents of violence shown in the film like the killing of innocent civilians in rebel hold-ups , landmine attacks, night raids on villages in which sleeping villagers get knifed, and other similar outrages are plausible reconstructions of cases often heard about.
The people are unsophisticated rural peasants who bear the brunt of these terrorist attacks. These people care little about race distinctions among them. They eke out a meager living in unenviable circumstances, but still live a life of sharing and caring. When an elderly man among a group of villagers including the seven month pregnant Kamalani riding in the open back of a tractor jolting along a rough road, urges the driver to drive slowly saying, "Otherwise Piyasoma's wife will give birth to her baby here and now!" (The feeling of intimacy and camaraderie of his plain, perfectly explicit, unedited, colloquial Sinhalese does not come out in this clumsy English rendering), he expresses their collective concern for her comfort and wellbeing.
The jungle-covered, isolated, primitive rural setting is appropriate for the depiction of the most fundamental human instincts of fellow feeling, trust, and sympathy that are being violated by terrorism. The jungle setting suits the rare atavistic nature of such violation of norms of civilized conduct. Besides, it is the very jungle terrain where the terrorist violence in question is actually taking place.
Terrorism sows suspicion among neighbours setting them against one another. What could be a more telling expression of this than Piyasoma's casual remark to Kamalani, while bathing in the tank about his apprehensions concerning her: "Who knows if you are secretly helping the terrorists"? It is inconceivable that Piyasoma of all people suspects Kamalani of involvement in the terrorist movement. But his ingenuous, childish words betray the deep, insidious mistrust of one community by another that is inevitably generated at a time of turmoil.
It is not only the social fabric that terrorism threatens. While vitiating the social atmosphere it turns innocents into killers. Prabhakaran kills civilians in cold blood because he is forced to do so by the terror outfit whose prisoner he is. Kamalani also kills, but for a different reason. Her act of killing Abe, who has been stalking her despite her attachment and marriage to Piyasoma (who, unaware of the man's secret passion for his wife, still treats him as a trusted friend), always lurking in the background, is something she is compelled to do by Abe's thoughtless, self-centred pursuit of her attentions merely because of his own infatuation with her. It proves her absolute devotion to Piyasoma. It is also an indication of the intensity of her suffering on account of her having to conceal from her husband her involvement with the terrorists, because it is nothing less than a betrayal of his trust in her. Abe's murder removes any lurking suspicion in us that Kamalani's chafing at the LTTE demand for her undertaking of a suicide mission is due to her tenderness or cowardice, or that she is capable of betrayal of a cause that she could genuinely pledge allegiance to. She kills Abe because her loyalty to her husband is total; she can't stand anyone who belittles or tries to call her devotion to him into question. It demonstrates that if she was truly committed to the terrorist cause she would not fail to serve that cause faithfully. The same goes for Prabhakaran. Therefore the rejection of the terrorist campaign by both of them is because of their unwavering loyalty to the truly meaningful values of humanity, love and respect for life.
For Kamalani and Piyasoma her pregnancy is the natural fruition of their love. But when she pleads with her handler or commander in the rebel organization that she be allowed to give birth to her child before the accomplishment of her mission, he reminds her of the fact that it was their stratagem to have her made pregnant for use as a suicide bomber in their terrorist scheme (her pregnancy would save her being searched by security personnel, which would facilitate her access to her target), and tells her not to worry about the unborn child.
What is more natural than the birth of new life? What is more unnaturally cruel than a terrorism that uses a pregnant woman as a human bomb to massacre innocents?
The image of the expectant woman present from the beginning to the end of the film is a central symbol in this film. Her survival at the end of the movie strikes a positive note. Kamalani is made to turn tables (by fate or some mysterious process of natural justice) on her tormentors by inadvertently blowing them up with a time-bomb that they have meant for her (delivered to her hidden in a bag supposed to be that of her dead brother); she walks home thus miraculously saved from the deadly treachery of her handlers.
The important thing is that Kamalani has survived all the chaos so far, and that her survival holds out some hope for the future.
Any artistic creation is a fusion of art and artifice. A film is no exception. But film, in comparison with other forms of art, which have existed for hundreds or even thousands of years, is of relatively recent origin, and hence naturally utilizes elements derived from those older modes. Film borrows from painting, plastic arts, photography, drama, fiction, poetry, and music, etc. This makes cinema an unusually complex, an unusually powerful artistic medium. Basically, of course, a film is a piece of visual art that depends on images, and that usually taps the resources of language and music.
It is the film-maker's business to blend all these elements into an effective vehicle for the conveyance of his or her innermost responses to striking experiences real or imaginary that excite our aesthetic sense. A good film like any other good work of art engages the connoisseurs' critical imagination for the reward of an apprehension of beauty in its contemplation, and a deepening of insight into an aspect of human experience.
Prabhakaran is an attempt in this direction. The ancient Latin poet Horace (65-08 BCE) held that the worth of a work of art could be gauged in terms of two criteria: an artistic work is of value if it 'pleases' and 'instructs'. In my opinion Thushara Peiris' film fulfills these criteria. Some critics may tend to see it as mere anti-LTTE propaganda. My own view is that the film's real focus is not the LTTE. It is not a critique of the LTTE cause. The LTTE campaign of terror is presented from the point of view of its direct victims represented by Prabhakaran the child soldier, and his sister Kamalani. The separatist cause – the oft repeated "a country for ourselves" - is simply a threadbare, vacuous slogan for these victims, like the soundless lip movements of the rebel commander in the film. What the viewers of the film, through its artistic devices, are made to emotionally experience is the tragedy of the needless dehumanization and destruction of blooming youth in the name of a single deranged megalomaniac's dreams of imperial domination.
The nature of our aesthetic sense is such that though the theme is bleak our sensitive response to its artistic presentation 'delights' us. At the same time the contemplation of the common humanity of the terrorists, and their victims (with whom we identify ourselves as vicarious sufferers) is a sobering thought for us.
A literary text – be it a poem like Homer's epic Iliad, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Tony Harrison's Under the Clock (from which my epigraph to this review comes), or a prose work like Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness – uses the resources of human language, mainly in the form of words that refer to things in the world of human experience; but a film principally relies on the arrangement of images on a screen which reconstructs situations in the same domain. In both cases the creative artist's role is the same: shaping out of his or her raw materials (words and images) an object of beauty – i.e. a finished poem/story/drama or a film for the contemplation and enjoyment of the aesthetes (at whatever level of sophistication they are capable of reaching).
Thushara Peiris has been conscious of this in the making of Prabhakaran. Though I don't think that I am competent enough to talk about the cinematographic aspect of film-making the shooting of the various scenes of this film has been attended to with care to highlight the really significant aspect of each shot. For example, we may consider the various shots of Kamalani waiting for her rendezvous with terror activists in the jungle. In one she stands under a large tree, and soliloquizes (Soliloquy is a device borrowed from drama that is used to reveal to the audience the innermost thoughts that pass through the mind of a character). This image of Kamalani, among other things, shows her smallness (vis-à-vis the huge issues she is confronting), and her isolation in a vast world of private misery. In another shot she is shown hiding in the hollow of a tree; she is unpleasantly surprised by the sudden appearance of the person from the rebel organization that she has been waiting for, and she tells him how frightened she is. The talk of fear irks the man. Her ingratiating attempt to make it a bit amusing is pathetic: "You frightened even the one inside me". The night raid on the sleeping village is another effective shot. Flickering points of light dancing in pitch darkness orchestrated by sounds of shouting and wailing actualize the numbing fear and terror of that experience for those who have only heard or read about such atrocities.
There are other signs of the film-maker's commitment to cinema as art. The use of symbolism is one. Trees, water, the moon, light, darkness, and many other details assume symbolic significance, which does not escape the average discerning viewer's notice. The film also uses such devices as the flashback technique, contrasts, parallels, and juxtaposition in its narration in order to highlight the relevant themes. All these invite the creative engagement of the audience with what is projected onto the screen by the director.
My 'reading' of the film is that it is mainly a criticism of the use of children by the terror organization. Even when Kamalani's self-immolation is demanded, the equally pitiable but more outrageously exploited victim is the unborn child (because, if it is merely a young woman they need for the mission, any other young woman would do; but here Kamalani qualifies for the mission because her pregnancy is an essential part of the camouflage, so diabolically planned by terror agents).
To the terrorists children count for nothing except as conscripts. When they get killed in clashes with the army, they are shown to the world as innocent school children massacred by the army, not as heroic fighters who have laid down their lives for a cause (even though they did so under duress). That is, the terrorists exploit them even after their death for propaganda purposes. So in my view, what is being held up for our condemnation is not any identifiable political cause (right or wrong), but the terrorists' sacrifice of children on the altar of some political ideology.
The young boy and the young woman playing the two central roles of Prabhakaran and Kamalani respectively do a commendable job by bringing these two characters alive for the film-goers in a convincing manner.
Therefore watching Prabhakaran should be a rewarding experience to many.
- Sri Lanka Guardian
Prabhakaran is not at all about the terrorist boss of that name. He is only a menacing presence in the background, which is occasionally invoked to exact obedience from those serving him under coercion. The film is based on an internal division in the terror organization between the bigoted leadership and the free thinking young disillusioned with its terror tactics.
Kamalani and her younger brother Prabhakaran are children of ethnically mixed parentage (father Tamil, mother Sinhalese) . They live in a so-called border village as members of a mixed community. Having lost their parents in their childhood to communal violence, they are brought up in an orphanage. Subsequently, Kamalani secretly joins the LTTE's suicide squad known as the Black Tiger Unit. She also gets her brother enlisted in the rebel movement. She is forced to marry Piyasoma, a young Sinhalese. The terror outfit tries to use both Prabhakaran and Kamalani in their campaign of terror through subjecting them to a kind of brainwashing about the necessity of avenging the murder of their parents. But when they see that it is poor people like themselves on both sides who get killed in communal violence, they lose faith in the terror outfit. Despite traumatic memories from the past, they do not now relish their part in rebel violence from which, however, they can't extricate themselves under the circumstances.
Kamalani becomes pregnant. The child inside her and her husband's love give her new hope. Prabhakaran, who is a child combatant, rebels against the repression of the terror group.
Isolated and stranded between their natural human passion for life and love, freedom and fulfillment on the one hand, and on the other, the relentless coercion of the terrorists they struggle heroically against their fate in their own way while events move inexorably to their tragic end.
The drama is unfolded against a rural, jungle setting. The time is the present time when Tamils, Sinhalese, and others coexist as peaceably as ever, despite the alleged ethnic conflict raging around them in the name of which a small section of the population is fighting a terrorist war against the government. The incidents of violence shown in the film like the killing of innocent civilians in rebel hold-ups , landmine attacks, night raids on villages in which sleeping villagers get knifed, and other similar outrages are plausible reconstructions of cases often heard about.
The people are unsophisticated rural peasants who bear the brunt of these terrorist attacks. These people care little about race distinctions among them. They eke out a meager living in unenviable circumstances, but still live a life of sharing and caring. When an elderly man among a group of villagers including the seven month pregnant Kamalani riding in the open back of a tractor jolting along a rough road, urges the driver to drive slowly saying, "Otherwise Piyasoma's wife will give birth to her baby here and now!" (The feeling of intimacy and camaraderie of his plain, perfectly explicit, unedited, colloquial Sinhalese does not come out in this clumsy English rendering), he expresses their collective concern for her comfort and wellbeing.
The jungle-covered, isolated, primitive rural setting is appropriate for the depiction of the most fundamental human instincts of fellow feeling, trust, and sympathy that are being violated by terrorism. The jungle setting suits the rare atavistic nature of such violation of norms of civilized conduct. Besides, it is the very jungle terrain where the terrorist violence in question is actually taking place.
Terrorism sows suspicion among neighbours setting them against one another. What could be a more telling expression of this than Piyasoma's casual remark to Kamalani, while bathing in the tank about his apprehensions concerning her: "Who knows if you are secretly helping the terrorists"? It is inconceivable that Piyasoma of all people suspects Kamalani of involvement in the terrorist movement. But his ingenuous, childish words betray the deep, insidious mistrust of one community by another that is inevitably generated at a time of turmoil.
It is not only the social fabric that terrorism threatens. While vitiating the social atmosphere it turns innocents into killers. Prabhakaran kills civilians in cold blood because he is forced to do so by the terror outfit whose prisoner he is. Kamalani also kills, but for a different reason. Her act of killing Abe, who has been stalking her despite her attachment and marriage to Piyasoma (who, unaware of the man's secret passion for his wife, still treats him as a trusted friend), always lurking in the background, is something she is compelled to do by Abe's thoughtless, self-centred pursuit of her attentions merely because of his own infatuation with her. It proves her absolute devotion to Piyasoma. It is also an indication of the intensity of her suffering on account of her having to conceal from her husband her involvement with the terrorists, because it is nothing less than a betrayal of his trust in her. Abe's murder removes any lurking suspicion in us that Kamalani's chafing at the LTTE demand for her undertaking of a suicide mission is due to her tenderness or cowardice, or that she is capable of betrayal of a cause that she could genuinely pledge allegiance to. She kills Abe because her loyalty to her husband is total; she can't stand anyone who belittles or tries to call her devotion to him into question. It demonstrates that if she was truly committed to the terrorist cause she would not fail to serve that cause faithfully. The same goes for Prabhakaran. Therefore the rejection of the terrorist campaign by both of them is because of their unwavering loyalty to the truly meaningful values of humanity, love and respect for life.
For Kamalani and Piyasoma her pregnancy is the natural fruition of their love. But when she pleads with her handler or commander in the rebel organization that she be allowed to give birth to her child before the accomplishment of her mission, he reminds her of the fact that it was their stratagem to have her made pregnant for use as a suicide bomber in their terrorist scheme (her pregnancy would save her being searched by security personnel, which would facilitate her access to her target), and tells her not to worry about the unborn child.
What is more natural than the birth of new life? What is more unnaturally cruel than a terrorism that uses a pregnant woman as a human bomb to massacre innocents?
The image of the expectant woman present from the beginning to the end of the film is a central symbol in this film. Her survival at the end of the movie strikes a positive note. Kamalani is made to turn tables (by fate or some mysterious process of natural justice) on her tormentors by inadvertently blowing them up with a time-bomb that they have meant for her (delivered to her hidden in a bag supposed to be that of her dead brother); she walks home thus miraculously saved from the deadly treachery of her handlers.
The important thing is that Kamalani has survived all the chaos so far, and that her survival holds out some hope for the future.
Any artistic creation is a fusion of art and artifice. A film is no exception. But film, in comparison with other forms of art, which have existed for hundreds or even thousands of years, is of relatively recent origin, and hence naturally utilizes elements derived from those older modes. Film borrows from painting, plastic arts, photography, drama, fiction, poetry, and music, etc. This makes cinema an unusually complex, an unusually powerful artistic medium. Basically, of course, a film is a piece of visual art that depends on images, and that usually taps the resources of language and music.
It is the film-maker's business to blend all these elements into an effective vehicle for the conveyance of his or her innermost responses to striking experiences real or imaginary that excite our aesthetic sense. A good film like any other good work of art engages the connoisseurs' critical imagination for the reward of an apprehension of beauty in its contemplation, and a deepening of insight into an aspect of human experience.
Prabhakaran is an attempt in this direction. The ancient Latin poet Horace (65-08 BCE) held that the worth of a work of art could be gauged in terms of two criteria: an artistic work is of value if it 'pleases' and 'instructs'. In my opinion Thushara Peiris' film fulfills these criteria. Some critics may tend to see it as mere anti-LTTE propaganda. My own view is that the film's real focus is not the LTTE. It is not a critique of the LTTE cause. The LTTE campaign of terror is presented from the point of view of its direct victims represented by Prabhakaran the child soldier, and his sister Kamalani. The separatist cause – the oft repeated "a country for ourselves" - is simply a threadbare, vacuous slogan for these victims, like the soundless lip movements of the rebel commander in the film. What the viewers of the film, through its artistic devices, are made to emotionally experience is the tragedy of the needless dehumanization and destruction of blooming youth in the name of a single deranged megalomaniac's dreams of imperial domination.
The nature of our aesthetic sense is such that though the theme is bleak our sensitive response to its artistic presentation 'delights' us. At the same time the contemplation of the common humanity of the terrorists, and their victims (with whom we identify ourselves as vicarious sufferers) is a sobering thought for us.
A literary text – be it a poem like Homer's epic Iliad, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Tony Harrison's Under the Clock (from which my epigraph to this review comes), or a prose work like Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness – uses the resources of human language, mainly in the form of words that refer to things in the world of human experience; but a film principally relies on the arrangement of images on a screen which reconstructs situations in the same domain. In both cases the creative artist's role is the same: shaping out of his or her raw materials (words and images) an object of beauty – i.e. a finished poem/story/drama or a film for the contemplation and enjoyment of the aesthetes (at whatever level of sophistication they are capable of reaching).
Thushara Peiris has been conscious of this in the making of Prabhakaran. Though I don't think that I am competent enough to talk about the cinematographic aspect of film-making the shooting of the various scenes of this film has been attended to with care to highlight the really significant aspect of each shot. For example, we may consider the various shots of Kamalani waiting for her rendezvous with terror activists in the jungle. In one she stands under a large tree, and soliloquizes (Soliloquy is a device borrowed from drama that is used to reveal to the audience the innermost thoughts that pass through the mind of a character). This image of Kamalani, among other things, shows her smallness (vis-à-vis the huge issues she is confronting), and her isolation in a vast world of private misery. In another shot she is shown hiding in the hollow of a tree; she is unpleasantly surprised by the sudden appearance of the person from the rebel organization that she has been waiting for, and she tells him how frightened she is. The talk of fear irks the man. Her ingratiating attempt to make it a bit amusing is pathetic: "You frightened even the one inside me". The night raid on the sleeping village is another effective shot. Flickering points of light dancing in pitch darkness orchestrated by sounds of shouting and wailing actualize the numbing fear and terror of that experience for those who have only heard or read about such atrocities.
There are other signs of the film-maker's commitment to cinema as art. The use of symbolism is one. Trees, water, the moon, light, darkness, and many other details assume symbolic significance, which does not escape the average discerning viewer's notice. The film also uses such devices as the flashback technique, contrasts, parallels, and juxtaposition in its narration in order to highlight the relevant themes. All these invite the creative engagement of the audience with what is projected onto the screen by the director.
My 'reading' of the film is that it is mainly a criticism of the use of children by the terror organization. Even when Kamalani's self-immolation is demanded, the equally pitiable but more outrageously exploited victim is the unborn child (because, if it is merely a young woman they need for the mission, any other young woman would do; but here Kamalani qualifies for the mission because her pregnancy is an essential part of the camouflage, so diabolically planned by terror agents).
To the terrorists children count for nothing except as conscripts. When they get killed in clashes with the army, they are shown to the world as innocent school children massacred by the army, not as heroic fighters who have laid down their lives for a cause (even though they did so under duress). That is, the terrorists exploit them even after their death for propaganda purposes. So in my view, what is being held up for our condemnation is not any identifiable political cause (right or wrong), but the terrorists' sacrifice of children on the altar of some political ideology.
The young boy and the young woman playing the two central roles of Prabhakaran and Kamalani respectively do a commendable job by bringing these two characters alive for the film-goers in a convincing manner.
Therefore watching Prabhakaran should be a rewarding experience to many.
- Sri Lanka Guardian
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