All Blankets Need Holes: Reflections On “Let Her Cry”
By Liyanage Amarakeerthi –May 25, 2016
Dr. Liyanage Amarakeerthi
The opening scene of Asoka Handagama’s new film Age Asa Aga (Let her cry) is also its last scene. Only thing we get to see here is a windshield of a car on a rainy night. The two wipers move fast mopping off the water from the windshield. The lights reflected on the glass seem to blur the vision even further. The driver, whose face we cannot see, struggles to find his way. Four voices are heard from within the car. They seem (or ‘heard’) to be speaking of a dramatic incident where a certain woman uprooted a ‘lamp-tree’ from a temple ground. They laugh, and then, one woman cries. Ardent moviegoers know that the crying voice belongs to Swarna Mallawaracchi – a versatile actress in Sinhala cinema. A male voice says, “Let her cry.”The constant rain falling on the windshield is wiped off by the wipers that move in to the rhythm of a heartbeat. The life within the car is sheltered from the rain outside. This, quasi ‘shelteredness’ has a tale to tell us.
The movie is a cinematic meditation on a relationship an aging university professor develops with a female student. As she herself declares, the student is in love with the professor and wants to have a child from him. The professor, even though he is visibly attracted to her, does not want to have an affair. He tells her that he likes her because she is talented in her studies and that he does not want to jeopardize his family life. The fact that his attraction to her is more than a teacher’s admiration is shown by his regular visits to her lodging place. In addition, he is in the habit of giving her rather romantic gifts such as perfume. The girl, while madly in love with the professor, keeps calling his aging wife (Swarna) to ‘brief’ her on the development of the relationship. Some pieces of information the girl communicates to the wife are in fact parts of her fantasy. She gains immense pleasure by playing with the wife’s sexual jealousy: the girl is professor’s fantasy and also the wife’s nightmare and pushing the older woman’s family to the brink of destruction.
From Identity Politics to Identity Crisis
The professor’s intellectual background is hard to know, and we do not get to see what he teaches at the university. The audience is provided with a very brief segment of a television interview where the professor talks about the problems of identity politics: Even that segment is not directly heard but rather overheard by the viewer. The professor’s teenage daughter, a constant TV watcher, briefly looks at her father’s talk show while changing channels. Elaborating on identity politics, the professor is heard to claim that a certain sense of insecurity is the reason for people to overly identify with language, race or religion. While he theorizes about identity crisis in macro politics of the country, he himself runs into a crisis or conflict of identity in his personal life: his identity as a professor conflicts with the identities as a husband and a father. It is difficult for him to achieve the full identity as a lover as well. As a member of society he does not looks to be organically connected: He speaks mostly in English and struggles to express himself in Sinhala to a wife who looks to be more comfortable in Sinhala. In that sense, he does not have complete identity in anything. The filmmaker, a master in handling cinematic language, shows us how the professor is trapped among many identities feeling complete in neither. For example, on the girl’s insistence, he takes her to a beach but he does not get out his car to walk with her as typical lovers would normally do. In the background, we see a family with young children walking on the beach semiotically indicating that his family is also in his troubled mind. Each time, he stops the car by the beach a family is seen walking between him and the ocean.
