This is one of the most enigmatic of Sinhala films that I have seen. I had to see it twice to understand the rationale of the non-linear narrative and the developing plot. It moves on at least two planes – one, the straight-forward storyline and the other, the surreal presence of Ayu, the little girl who titles the film.
First for the story. A young doctor, Nishmi, is caught up in a dissatisfying marriage with a tour operator who is hardly at home. She is uneasy about his regular absences from home and disturbed about the foreign feminine voices she hears in the background whenever she phones him and his postponements about when he is coming home. She is not at all close to her widowed mother who seems to visit her often. The mother, caring as most mothers are, steeped in Buddhist cultural traditions, is nevertheless an annoying presence in the apartment. Her Buddhist piousness seems to annoy Nishmi. As the story develops, we come to realise that the mother is worried about Nishmi and wants her to attend a Bodhi Pooja she has arranged. It was somewhat later that we became aware of Nishmi’s serious illness and the appeal to the spiritual by the mother is because Nishmi is afflicted with HIV.
The flashforward to Nishmi going for a night out on the beach is sudden and leaves us somewhat bewildered. The first assumption is that she seems to have decided that she needs some excitement for her lonely life with the husband away. The way she readily (too readily) and coyly, befriends the beach boy Sachin, makes us wonder whether she is really in it for a good time – in vengefulness for the possible infidelities of her husband with foreign women.
The first turning point in the film comes with her discovery that she is pregnant and her decision to go all the way to Ella where her husband is on a group tour. She meets with an accident, and we find her in hospital with multiple injuries and bleeding heavily. The outcome is that she loses her pregnancy and is wheelchair bound.
The fact that she has had to have a blood transfusion is not clearly revealed at first. Later, she is found positive for HIV. She reacts with fury at the husband whom she suspects to have given her the virus through his ‘affairs’ with multiple foreign women. There is a severe showdown, and she insists that the husband leaves the house.
Nishmi goes through serious depression and loss of will to live knowing that her days are numbered. We see her gulping a handful of pills with her mother pleading outside the closed door. But we are not sure whether she is not willing to undergo immediate treatment that is now available, or whether the complete breakdown of her marriage makes her suicidal, or whether she is unaware of modern treatments. But we must dismiss the last possibility as, surely, she is a doctor.
I am left wondering whether she is unaware of her illness when she frolics with the beach boy and a growing warmth and intimacy develop between her and Sachin. Because we get to know that by this time, she is aware of her illness. The contrasting juxtaposition of her depression and her sense of joy in the presence of Sachin is not easy to unravel. I still can’t.
The next twist in the narrative comes with a phone call from her husband – who still proclaims his innocence and his love and loyalty to Nishmi – in which he gleefully announces that “It is negative” with a sense of being vindicated of her accusations. It takes a few moments before we realise that he is referring to an HIV test he has done. It is then that Nishmi’s attention turns to the blood donation she received during the accident. She goes looking to find who the donor is.
Let me digress a bit at this point.
I am aware of dramatic/artistic/cinematic license to deviate from the real world for narrative effect. The medical lapses observed in the film are stated here not to devalue this excellent film in any way. I must make a few observations in this regard. It seems that Sachin as a donor has escaped detection as a HIV carrier at several ‘checkpoints’ in the process adopted during blood donations. The lengthy and detailed questionnaire and the counselling interview before the donation would have shown that Sachin, as a beach boy with a highly probable history of multiple sex partners would have been at high-risk and his attempt at voluntary donation should have been rejected at the outset. Unless he lied in the questionnaire and the interview – which is informed in writing to donors as a punishable offence. All blood is serologically tested in Sri Lanka for HIV, Hepatitis B and C, syphilis and malaria.
I presume that it is neither irony nor a coincidence, that Nishmi is a paediatrician and she contracts HIV through a blood donation. The basis of this story has close similarities to an event in the past. Perhaps the seed of the story for the film comes from there.
On a dreary November day in 1995, Dr. Kamalika Abeyratne, Consultant Paediatrician, Lady Ridgeway Teaching Hospital, Colombo, her husband Dr. Micheal Abeyratne, Paediatric Surgeon and their son were travelling on the Galle Road for a medical meeting. The car skidded on a slippery road and hit a concrete post and Dr. Kamalika was badly injured. She was given two pints of blood at Karapitiya and 34 blood transfusions at SJP hospitals. Six months later she was found to be positive for HIV. But then, the procedure for detection of HIV in blood donors was not fully established.
Whereas it is still possible that a HIV positive donor (false negative) can go undetected in serological testing, it is extremely rare today and they are thoroughly investigated. From Sachin’s character, where we find an innate humanism and an understanding of life and its mysteries, we may dismiss the possibility of him being a vengeful donor who deliberately donates blood under false pretexts to spread the disease. Such instances of vengeful donations are known the world over and Sri Lanka as well.
The donor of a positive transfusion transmission of HIV can be traced and followed up. But as shown in Ayu, there is still no definitive provision in Sri Lanka for the victim to be informed of the identity of the donor. Under the circumstances, why Sachin, being a high-risk donor remained undetected and not rejected as a donor, is cinematic license for dramatic effect and therefore, understandable.
Returning to the film, we come to realise that the identity of Sachin as the donor was given to Nishmi surreptitiously by an obliging doctor-colleague hastily written on a scrap of paper. It is then that we are shown how Nishmi goes in search of this donor and discovers Sachin and why she deliberately befriends him. The reason behind her going to beach nights is understood only at that point in the film.
There are many moments that Nishmi is reflective of life and talks about the indefinite destinies of individuals caught in the vicissitudes of life, and the metaphor of the endless sea comes into good effect. The paper boat that she builds also indicates the fragility of life in a mighty sea of random circumstance. She tells Sachin – “We are in the same boat”. But we come to realise later, that the boat carries critically important messages that connect critical points in the narrative – Sachin’s name and address given by the doctor and Sachin’s last testament which Nishmi reads while Sachin’s body is taken out of the church as the film slowly moves towards its conclusion.
Ayu 2
Now, we come to the surreal that takes the film transcends a simple tragic love story to become a cinematic masterpiece. Who is ‘Ayu’ and what is she doing in the film? Why is she central to the film for it to be titled after her? I concluded, after much thought, that she doesn’t exist physically. Then, how do we see her? She is obviously a metaphor. Metaphor for what?
In the film, our first meeting with her is when Ayu is on the beach with a childhood toy that spins in the wind (bambare) which is later seen in the water damaged and being washed away in the waves. This toy could be symbolic of the cycle of life – the samsaric journeys that we traverse in Buddhist mythology. Is this opening a grim reminder – a metaphor – of the theme that permeates the film?
Of lives caught up in this cycle; of wasted youth? We come to understand that this film hangs on the Buddhist philosophy of the four sublime states – Metta, Karuna, Muditha and Upekka and the hoary traditions of Sinhala Buddhist culture.
We next see Ayu when Nishmi is doing her ward round in hospital, and she/we observe an empty bed with a bed sheet carelessly left behind. In clinical experience, when we see an empty bed, the first thought that rushes to our minds is death. A patient has died and has been removed to the mortuary. Only thereafter, on inquiry might we be told that the patient has been taken for investigations or else, just gone to the toilet. But death hangs there in that image until we find the occupant of that bed, Ayu, sitting by herself in an adjacent room. Does Ayu depict Nishmi’s loneliness – feeling alone, uncared for and as bewildered as a child whose grandmother has not come to see her?
While we see the developing relationship between Nishmi and Sachin, with moods fluctuating from joy to melancholy and uncertainties and the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’, a distinctly ‘Bollywoodian’ scene confronts us. Rain, wet clothes, gloom and dusk descending into night, cuddling closely in the cold for warmth in an isolated tree-hut in a desolate nowhere, leaves us as voyeurs of a close intimacy. As morning breaks, Nishmi suddenly observes Ayu skipping down the path. Nishmi’s joyous reaction is consonant with the happy demeanor of Ayu, but Ayu is far more subdued. Obviously, Nishmi is overjoyed with the outcome of that night. Sachin comes down and sees Ayu for the first time.
Ever since, Ayu has taken a role that connects Nishmi and Sachin to each other. Every following scene has the threesome together – on the beach and on the train. The train symbolizes the passage of time and Ayu watching the passing scenery in silent contemplation tells us that Nishmi and Sachin are now linked in life with Ayu the child – as a symbol of the little time – ayu’ (life) left for them. It is nevertheless a happy time of togetherness with Ayu holding their hands and ‘connecting’ Nishmi and Sahin to each other. They are bound together to the limited time of ‘ayu’ left – denoted by the little child that is Ayu.
The complete absence of emotion at all times in Ayu’s face, gradually leaves us with a frightful foreboding. We come to realise that Ayu is just a timekeeper. Ayu is the personification of time. The foreboding intensifies in the hospital scene where Sachin is seriously ill. Ayu walks in alone (Nishmi is not to be seen) and looks at Sachin and seems to know what he wants. She deliberately slowly opens the bedside drawer and takes Sachin’s purse almost on cue – knowing what Sachin wants and gives it to him. He takes out the small paper boat and gives it to her. We see a close up of the crumpled bed sheet as the waves of the sea and Ayu’s hand taking the boat on the crests and troughs of it. The boat is facing rough seas. Suddenly, again as in the early scene in the hospital ward, we are chillingly confronted with the symbolism of Ayu as death. Time is up to take Sachin away. Later, we see Ayu in the funeral scene with Nishmi. One gone, one to go.
And in the final scene we see Nishmi and Ayu in a boat in still waters and we hear Nishmi’s words in the background where we come to understand that Nishmi wills to live and will take treatment. She veers the boat and changes direction – and we see in that instance, that Ayu is no longer on the boat. We are left at the end of the film with a ray of hope that all is not lost.
I find this film to be extremely cerebral and visually rewarding. The direction and cinematography by this young team is exceptional. The glimmering lights on the receding waves on the beach, the fireworks in the dark as Nishmi walks drunkenly on the beach, the clarity of the contrasts in the colour palette, vivid use of close ups strategically of faces, shows a super mastery of the cinematic medium.
Jagath Manuwarna is excellent in giving life in a very realistic way to a beach boy. He seems to have endured a pierced eyebrow to add to the authenticity of the character. I first saw him in his own directorial debut Rahas Kiyana Kandu (whispering Mountains) in which he was the main actor as well. It too was a new genre. And he was exceedingly good there too.
Sandra Mack in her first cinematic role, acts with great feeling and maturity. The full spectrum and nuances of emotion demanded of her is dealt with exceptional finesse and subtlety as any veteran would have. What a great find for Sinhala cinema!
by Susirith Mendis 
(susmend2610@mail.com)
from The Island https://ift.tt/vmYB7Ot
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