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With You, Without You

SriLankan writer-director Prasanna Vithanage again explores loneliness and helplessness in With You, Without You, a Fyodor Dostoyevsky novella (The Meek One, 1876) adaptation, deftly projected to SriLanka of 136 years later. It is dark, mainly bleak and sad, offers some hope and escape along the way, but veers towards an inevitable ending.

Buddhist pawn-broker Sarathsiri leads a dull and purely functional existence, operating a shop on the ground floor and living above it, alone. He has a maid who comes in to do the cooking and chores, and his only other recreation is watching Wrestlemania. One day the beautiful, enigmatic Selvi, a Tamil girl, comes into his shop to pledge some gold, and he falls in love with her. On hearing that she is to be married off, he even musters-up enough courage to propose to her, and they get married. Sarathsiri now thinks he has finally found a way to put his haunting past behind him. But a chance visit from an old friend, from the time when the two were part of the Sinhala army battling the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), opens up wounds that tear open the barely healing fabric of a mutilated nation coming to grips with the unspeakable cost of a thirty year civil war.

Prasanna Vithanage began with theatre and made his first film in 1992. His fourth feature Purahanda Kaluwara (Death on a Full Moon Day, 1997), which he wrote and directed, was initially banned by the SriLankan minister in charge of films. It was later released after a year-long legal battle. 2008 saw Prasanna Vithanage’s sixth feature film as director, Akasa Kusum (Flowers of the Sky) being appreciated at the International Film Festival of India.

In terms of style, With You, Without You is similar to Akasa Kusum. But there are some remarkable touches. Shadows and light across human faces, sudden cuts to a top angle long shot, match-cuts smooth as silk, the creative use of framing against the two parts of a window-curtain, eloquent silences, sparse settings, a motor-cycle that is used as a blended part of the proceedings. Had he not mentioned it in the credits, one would never guess the story was adapted from a Dostoyevsky novella. Perhaps he has gone overboard in the characterisation of Selvi, but you have to judge that against the background of the climax. Sarathsiri’s name is first heard half-way into the film. Selvi…I do not remember hearing it at all. There is little or no back-story of Sarathsiri, though we get a peep into Selvi’s past.

Shyam Fernando plays Sarathsiri with great command. The meaninglessness of his life, and his ambition to buy a part of a tea estate, come alive in every expression. Emotions do not come easily to him, and when they do surface, he underplays beautifully. A theatre veteran, Shyam Fernando makes his big screen debut with this film. Welcome, Shyam! India’s Anjali Patil is the surprise choice for Selvi. Considering her mother-tongue is Marathi and not Tamil, it is even more surprising. More surprises? She played a Naxalite (Maoists who engage in armed conflict with the Indian government) in Prakash Jha's Chakravyuh, and in this film, she plays the victim of civil war conflict. But read on. She is a product of the National School of Drama (NSD), New Delhi and made her debut in Prashant Nair’s Delhi in a Day. After Chakravyuh, she acted in Praksh Jha’s Satyagraha too. Anjali has dubbed all the dialogue herself. Her looks match the image of a tormented Tamil survivor. Trauma and mild hysteria pose no challenge to Anjali. Although Vithanage does not give much leeway to Sarathsiri to strike nuances, he lets Selvi carry her turmoil quite overtly.  

One must put in a word for M.D. Mahindapala, Director of Photography and A. Sreekar Prasad, the Editor (who co-produced Akasa Kusum). There are few locations to photograph, and most of them are repetitive, but we still see them as fresh. Such a heavy, gloomy, perhaps pessimistic film would have been much harder to absorb had the editing not made it look slick.

Rating: ***

Trailer: http://withyouwithoutyou.com/?page_id=572