‘Let Her Cry’: Just Another Review
Fragments.-
Uditha Devapriya is a freelance writer who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com
Monday, June 6, 2016
I know a teacher who offers comments about our cinema from time to time. Just the other day we were talking about Asoka Handagama. He hadn’t seen Let Her Cry, which was previewed to the media a month back and given a limited release at Regal some weeks ago, but based on what I told him about the film (without any spoilers, of course), he gave his two cents on the man. It all amounted to this: Handagama can’t be forced to conform. If you watch a film of his, you watch it the way he wants you to. And if there are any complaints about the way he’s directed it, too bad.
He also observed that Handagama likes to dabble in ellipsis. Every film of his contains elliptical narratives, which is another way of saying that they aren’t easy to figure out in advance. His characters do not act in a preconceived way. They exist and persist, they cry, break apart, and express outrage so unpredictably that you don’t know what’s coming next. On one level this works beautifully – that is why I enjoyed Chanda Kinnari, particularly the exchanges between Swarna Mallawarachchi’s character and her neighbours – but sometimes he overdoes it. I’m not belittling him, of course, because after all that’s the “Handagama touch”. Without it, none of his films would actually work.
Vageesha Sumanasekara’s take on Let Her Cry (published in Groundviews) lambasts the film for basically not being political enough. He indulges in postmodernism to explain his reaction to the film. Liyanage Amarakeerthi, on the other hand, has (in an article published in “The Island”) taken the opposite position and praised it as a “masterly crafted work of art” (to his credit he discusses the film as a film, which Sumanasekara doesn’t do). I don’t pretend to know a fraction of what these two people do, so I won’t take sides yet. This isn’t an analysis, hence, but just another review.
To start things off, I admit Let Her Cry isn’t a masterpiece. I’m not saying this because it’s crap, but because to pretend otherwise won’t do Handagama himself any justice. Those I’ve talked with about the film (not critics, but ordinary filmgoers) seem to have thought that it betrayed the director’s lack of patience. They pointed at the last few sequences which culminate in that drive to the protagonist’s house (which was where the film opened as well, incidentally), and claimed that they were too quickly edited to offer reflection. Normally I’d disagree with them, but this time I can’t. For the truth of the matter is, Let Her Cry ends up making a personal statement that would have worked if the director hadn’t conceived of it as a socio-political dissertation in that final sequence. I’ll come back to this later.
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He also observed that Handagama likes to dabble in ellipsis. Every film of his contains elliptical narratives, which is another way of saying that they aren’t easy to figure out in advance. His characters do not act in a preconceived way. They exist and persist, they cry, break apart, and express outrage so unpredictably that you don’t know what’s coming next. On one level this works beautifully – that is why I enjoyed Chanda Kinnari, particularly the exchanges between Swarna Mallawarachchi’s character and her neighbours – but sometimes he overdoes it. I’m not belittling him, of course, because after all that’s the “Handagama touch”. Without it, none of his films would actually work.
Vageesha Sumanasekara’s take on Let Her Cry (published in Groundviews) lambasts the film for basically not being political enough. He indulges in postmodernism to explain his reaction to the film. Liyanage Amarakeerthi, on the other hand, has (in an article published in “The Island”) taken the opposite position and praised it as a “masterly crafted work of art” (to his credit he discusses the film as a film, which Sumanasekara doesn’t do). I don’t pretend to know a fraction of what these two people do, so I won’t take sides yet. This isn’t an analysis, hence, but just another review.
To start things off, I admit Let Her Cry isn’t a masterpiece. I’m not saying this because it’s crap, but because to pretend otherwise won’t do Handagama himself any justice. Those I’ve talked with about the film (not critics, but ordinary filmgoers) seem to have thought that it betrayed the director’s lack of patience. They pointed at the last few sequences which culminate in that drive to the protagonist’s house (which was where the film opened as well, incidentally), and claimed that they were too quickly edited to offer reflection. Normally I’d disagree with them, but this time I can’t. For the truth of the matter is, Let Her Cry ends up making a personal statement that would have worked if the director hadn’t conceived of it as a socio-political dissertation in that final sequence. I’ll come back to this later.
