Anantha Rathriya
A Beautiful Sri Lankan Film

Directed By: Prasanna Vithanage
By Shoma A Chatterji

Unlike any popular film centering on a prostitute, Anantha Rathriya does not use the women as object as the combined gaze of spectator and all the male characters in the film. Though she is isolated, the isolation is not the consequence of glamour. She is not on display, nor is she sexualized except in a single dramatic sequence, which is critical to the narrative. Rather, it is her introspection, reflection, repentance and regret of the man who directly or indirectly moves her to prostitution 25 years ago that is the central theme of the film.

Anantha Rathriya (Dark Night of the Soul) is Prasanna Vithanage's second full-length feature film, inspired by Tolstoy's last novel, The Resurrection. The film is relocated in terms of time and face to contemporary Sri Lanka, opening with the middle-aged hero, Suwisal, stepping over puddles on a rainy night to enter sprawling mansion that is dead, save for the faithful family retinue who opens the door and shows him the light. Suwisal, a successful company director, engaged rather reluctantly to a beautiful young girl from an affluent Westernised family, is suddenly shaken out of his bourgeois lifestyle when he is asked to be a juror in a murder trial. A client has been murdered by young sex worker. Suwisal recognizes in her the very young Piyum, a girl he seduced, made pregnant and then ditched, finally leaving her to enter the oldest profession in the world. Piyum shows no sign of recognizing him. But Suwisal's journey into an inner world begins.

He moves back into his past as his present disturbs him. We discover him as a little child surrounded by three aunts who dote on him, while the old caretaker's little girl peeps happily from behind the curtain. She is the little Piyum. Suwisal leaves his ancestral as strapping young man; Piyum is a naïve, beautiful teenager and he seduces her, more in an act of dominance-submission, which the girl surrenders to because she is in the position of a subservient servant. He leaves, only to return when the girl in the dock superimposes his past onto his present, leaving him to introspect on a future he is no longer certain about.

Piyum is sentenced for a murder committed more by an accident, underlining the tragedy of her profession. She laces her drunken client's drink with a tranquilizer and he dies almost at once. This is her way of seeking escape from prostitution. When Suwisal comes to meet her in prison, she refuses to recognize him at first and then asks him never to visit her again. Piyum is released to find Suwisal waiting in his car at the prison entrance. She looks down at him as he up from behind the steering wheel. But her look is proud and regal, her body language defining that pride as she walks away from him with her dignity being the only thingy she has left. In doing so, she sentences him for life to the world out there, a life imprisonment from which there is no release and no redemption. continue