Right at the beginning, we know things don’t end too well.
She says she can’t love him half-heartedly, while he wonders why she did what she did when she could have been with anyone she wanted.
Director Prasanna Vithanage, aided by editor Sreekar Prasad, chooses to tell this tragic love story in a flashback, as two monologues — his and hers — take us through the love story.
He’s a pawn-broker, the shrewd, meticulous kind who adds the interest of the whole month even when the poor are only two days late in paying the interest… when he meets her. A girl who frequently brings different bits of her jewellery to pawn for survival. One day, she wants to pawn her mobile phone and he tells her he only takes gold. He gives her the money anyway. She doesn’t want his help. She is too proud.
It is circumstances that bring them together but soon, she makes him want to be a better man. And he makes her feel happy and loved.
Sri Lankan auteur Vithanage crafts a rather unlikely, unusual romance between two loners who need each other to fill the void in their lives. And as they slowly fall in love, differences crop up. Differences that cannot be resolved because of who they WERE. On opposite sides of the ethnic conflict.
As a closely guarded secret threatens to rock their domestic life, we begin to understand why dwelling in the past would only abort their blossoming love story.
This love-hate-love story between a Sri Lankan Tamil girl and a Sinhala pawn broker could be the story of the island nation itself — where love is just blossoming between the two ethnic groups after a long, traumatic and turbulent period of war when the scars of the past are threatening to trigger hatred for the other every day.
Ironically, mischief-makers and separatists showed their ugly face again by threatening to disrupt the release of this Sri Lankan film in Chennai, despite the clearance by the Central Board of Film Certification — with NO cuts. And the State witnessed another instance of mob censorship, after Shoojit Sircar’s Madras Café and Santosh Sivan’s Inam .
This divisive identity politics of hate that is wrecking lives and affecting normalcy is exactly what the film tries to address and threats issued to theatres screening the film in fact, tell us who the real enemy is — organisations and individuals who are against normalcy, peace and love between the two communities. All under the pretext of showing their misplaced sense of solidarity.
Vithanage wants his love story to have a happy ending, he wants the couple to start afresh… but the scars are so powerful that the girl thinks that she cannot be with him or without him. She is torn between her love for him and the hate for his kind.
In an interview, the director said he didn’t want us to sympathise with either side. He wants us to empathise with them. And we do, thanks to the wonderfully nuanced, realistic performances by the excellent Anjali Patil (who has even dubbed in Tamil and Sinhala herself) and the superbly understated Shyam Fernando.
It’s a heartbreaking film, no doubt, an intensely romantic and poignant post-war narrative that makes us see the futility and the danger of living in the past. The only thing between you and a happily-ever-after is the inability to let go of the past.
Wish the stray groups protesting the release of this film understood that the only way to ensure peace in Sri Lanka is through love, not hate. And the only way to secure a happy future is by letting go of the painful past.
