The film's up close and personal focus, insofar as there is one, revolves around the house of a soldier, Anura (Mahendra Perera), who, rifle in hand, splits shifts standing guard in a tiny booth with an older veteran, Piyasiri (Hemasiri Liyange). Anura's bored wife, Lata (Nilupilli Jayawardena), has embarked on an affair with another soldier. Soma (Kaushalya Fernando), his sister who lives with them, remains devout. Her constant wide-eyed watchfulness almost becomes an entity in itself. She's the soul of the film, along with the little girl, Batti (Pudika Sapurni Peiris), who doesn't say "when I grow up," but "if I grow up." Yet her daily trudge out to a dirt road to catch her school bus each day seems, in the context of the rest of the film, a huge gesture in the direction of hope for a future.
The humans seem like driftwood, even when the old man tells the little girl a folkloric fairytale that roots their lives in communal myth. Jayasundara, in an impressively assured debut feature, isn't one to hold out consoling portents, however. Nor does he succumb to the temptation to offer solace in the natural world. For each stunning pink sunset, there are half a dozen shots of flat, scrubby terrain, muddy ditches, green leaves turning sere. Clearly the climate he's concerned with here is internal, not external, and he serves it up with unflagging atmospheric wallop, even in poetic mode. It's courageous of him to remain unswervingly focused on the glum monotony of the characters' lives, with seldom any relieving incident. The film's sexual affair, far from offering even the smallest hint of Lawrentian liberation, ends in tragedy and yet more loss, and is more desperate than joyous while it lasts.
Moreover, Anura's humanity is assailed even in a time of official cessation of hostilities as he's ordered to participate in the grisly activities of a covert death squad. He seems almost as much a victim as the soldiers' kidnapped target. Not that any of the characters rides a clear narrative arc. The fragmenting chaos of the war's effects on all of them rules that out, and Jayasundara echoes this with an integrity that is admirable, although sometimes, frankly, numbing. It isn't every filmmaker who can commit to a full-bore portrayal of corrosive lassitude with this kind of rigor, and it's easy to understand why Jayasundara took the Camera d'or, awarded to the best first film, at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.
Subsequently, at the Toronto Film Festival, Jayasundara, in a widely-disseminated interview, spoke of being influenced by the Russian master, Andrei Tarkovsky. Doubtless the comparison was brought on by their long, slow takes, the choice to sacrifice momentum and incident to an emphasis on giving carefully chosen images a chance to imprint. But the pairing of Jayasundara and Tarkovsky is more misleading than enlightening. The likenesses are only superficial. Tarkovsky's films, glacially paced though they sometimes are, always reflect Tarkovsky's spirituality. No matter now deadening the subject matter of Tarkovsky's often almost static films could seem, his belief in the human spirit in itself betokens a kind of optimism and hope. The same cannot be said of Jayasundara's film. It harks back to the nihilism and despair of Theatre of the Absurd, with its brave but bleak facing up to what its practitioners saw as the barren postwar legacy of WWII. While you can't help admiring the integrity of Jayasundara's vision, and the skill with which he renders it, The Forsaken Land is almost as paralyzing an experience for its audiences as it is for its characters.
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by Jay Carr
