With You, Without You: The irreconcilable politics of reconciliation

The following review contains spoilers

By Shiran Illanperuma

Three years after its creation, Prasanna Vithanage’s latest film, With You, Without You, finally saw a national release on 3 September. 

An adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novella, The Meek One, the film follows a discharged Sinhala soldier and Jaffna-Tamil woman whose chance encounter leads to a tragic romance. The film explores salient post-war themes such as reconciliation, racism, misogyny and war crimes; particularly sexual assault.

The film which has already toured the world screening for film festivals and diaspora communities, has courted acclaim and controversy in equal measure. A domestic release has been long stalled due to conflict with state authorities and the censor board. “Any filmmaker in Sri Lanka has to wait at least a year and a half to screen their film,” says Vithanage. 

It was with great reluctance that Vithanage submitted his latest film to the censor board in 2014, when the Rajapaksa regime was still in power. Familiar with the State policies of the time Vithanage did not expect his film to be given stamp of approval. “Everything was viewed through the narrow nationalistic lens of Mahinda Chinthana,” he said.

Vithanage’s concerns were well founded as the censor board responded by asking him to remove several scenes and lines of dialogue. With the backing of his producers, he refused. His integrity would not allow him to screen a product different to what audiences at film festivals and diaspora communities across the world had seen. 

“In Sri Lanka, our State has been determined to shape a cinema that is child-friendly, but what we’ve ended up with is a childish cinema,” he quips. 

Indeed Sri Lankan cinema has experienced stunted growth over the years compared to its regional counterparts in South and Southeast Asia. “When journalists in India ask me about censorship in Sri Lanka, I say we have very liberal censorship here,” Vithanage jokes. 

However, with swift rise to power of a new regime, Vithanage immediately wrote a letter asking for the film to be reconsidered. To his surprise, they acquiesced. He says, “After every election there is a honeymoon period, the new government enacts a few positive policies to curry favour with the masses. But after a while we eventually see their true face.”

The long-awaited film managed to reel in Rs. 2.4 m in its first week, respectable revenue for an art house film, according to distributors Cinema Entertainment Pvt. Ltd. Irrespective of financial gain, Vithanage hopes that audiences will engage with the themes and politics of the film. “If there is no reconciliation in Sri Lanka, there is no future for this country,” he says darkly.

Hill country blues

While the media-laden memory of the civil war evokes images of eastern beaches littered with artillery, northern jungles held by tiger rebels and southern cities tense with military checkpoints, Vithanage chose to forego all of these conventional locales. Having explored such settings in previous films like August Sun, Vithanage elected for a change of scenery for his thesis on reconciliation. Enter: the Hill Country.

High up above the raging cities and villages of the lowland, the Hill Country sets an eerily serene stage for a story set so soon after a bloody war. The gently pulsing breezes, creeping mists and blue-green hues of the Hill Country wrap every scene in a dream-like quality. In a way, it was a masterstroke.

After all, what better place to set a drama about the scars of ethnic strife and post-colonialism than where it all began? 

The Hill Country may have seen relatively little combat during the course of the war but it was where the Kandyan Kingdom once stood proudly, where colonials evicted Sinhala villagers to carve up land for plantations, where indentured Indian Tamil workers were brought to toil in the service of empire and where an independent Ceylon sowed the seeds of ethnic discord by disenfranchising these same workers.

Vithanage’s reasoning for choosing the setting however, was far simpler. During his research, he discovered a tiny community of Jaffna Tamils living supposedly integrated with their Indian-origin ethnic kin. 

“I found out that some Northern Tamils had lived in the Hill Country since a young age, their parents sent them there to be sheltered from the war,” he explains. Stumbling upon this is what ultimately made the director settle on his setting.

Yet regardless of authorial intent, one can’t help but be drawn into the enigmatic stage of the Hill Country which is layered with history. Thanks to Vithanage’s masterful use of cinematography, The Hill Country becomes a character in its own right.

War crimes and bad romances

Vithanage’s directorial style has been often been celebrated (and rightfully so) for its realism and humanism. Therefore it is disappointing to be confronted with the characters of Selvi and Sarasthri (played by Anjali Patil and Shyam Fernando respectively), whose lack of chemistry is a far cry from one of Vithanage’s more iconic onscreen couples; Saman and Chamari from August Sun

Audiences are expected to accept stony stares and impenetrable facades as replacement for meaningful character development. The actors’ performances leave a little too much to the imagination, failing to illuminate an unfathomable attraction that escalates from staring to stalking to marriage in a bizarrely edited sequence of events.

To be fair however, the primordial discomfort felt while watching Selvi and Sarasthri awkwardly navigate married life has less to do with their performances than with the substance of the narrative itself.

It’s no secret that Sri Lankan soldiers have been historically accused of sexual violence against Tamil women. The recent report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights outlined that “rape and sexual violence against Tamil women during the final stages of the armed conflict and, in its aftermath, are greatly under-reported.” 

With such a contextual backdrop, a depiction of romance between a retired officer and a woman who is ostensibly an IDP sends alarm bells ringing.

As the story unfolds the audience finds out that Sarasthri’s friend had raped a Tamil woman during the war, and that it was Sarasthri’s false testimonies that lead to him being acquitted. This knowledge combined with a camera intent on lingering on Selvi’s body, fetishizing her every movement, calls to question the ethics of using the genre of tragic romance to explore ethnic conflict and reconciliation, or as Vithanage aptly says “non-reconciliation”.

Even in terms of casting With You, Without You sadly comes up short as Selvi’s character is played by Indian Anjali Patil rather than a Lankan-origin actor. Acknowledging the adverse effect war and racism has had on Sri Lankan Tamil film production, Vithanage says he was unable to find suitable local talent to play Selvi. 

“I came very close to hiring one particular girl; however I was not confident she could carry the second half of the film. Unfortunately a side effect of the lack of Tamil representation in Sri Lankan cinema is also the lack of professionals to hire.” 

One hopes that progressive casting choices by veterans like Vithanage would change this but sadly With You, Without You was not to be a platform for a young and upcoming local actress.

In a political environment where calling explicit attention to such issues is still taboo, With You, Without You is still a refreshing change compared to the recent glut of Sinhala-nationalist films thinly veiled as historical epics. 

Featuring Sinhala and Tamil in dialogue in equal measure, Vithanage is one of the few film directors to work towards building a bilingual national cinema in opposition to Sri Lanka’s history of Sinhala only cinema.