Paradise review: Darshana Rajendran knocks it out of the park in the Roshan Mathew-starrer which probes male psyche, Sri Lankan crisis and Ramayana

Paradise is a must-watch. Sri Lankan filmmaker Prasanna Vithanage scripts a political story through a personal lens, in which the alarm of the allure and amour propre raises its head. Vithanage, much like John Milton, has created a piece of work, so simple in appearance, so layered in profundity. On the face of it, here is the story of a man and wife, embraced in conjugal bliss or so it appears as the two Malayalees take their fifth anniversary trip to Sri Lanka, at a time it was going through an economic crisis, because it will be an “affordable” destination. But what happens when you are robbed of your material things in an alien land?

Paradise Trailer and Overview

Produced by Newton Cinema and presented by Mani Ratnam’s Madras Talkies, Paradise was awarded the top prestigious prize Kim Jiseok Award for the Best Film last year at South Korea’s Busan International Film Festival. Over the last three decades, Sinhala filmmaker Prasanna Vithanage, who ushered in a ‘new wave’ with Anantha Rathriya (1996), is the pioneer of third generation of Sri Lankan cinema, and has been consistently filming the Sri Lankan conundrum, his gaze turned inwards, on to human relationships. His latest outing, however, is in the Malayalam language (his first Indian-language film), with Malayalee actors.

Paradise as a critique of its times

Paradise is a tinderbox of unresolved tension. It spotlights a volatile region, not just the Sri Lankan crisis but a crisis in marriage, too. From the simmering strain between a couple to the seething tension between the ethnic groups of people. In this film, between the dominant Sinhalese and Sri Lankan Tamils or “(tea) estate workers”. Police officer Sgt. Bandara (Mahendra Perera), emblematic of the dominant race and a statist tool of oppression.

If the famous French essayist Roland Barthes claimed in his book Mythologies (1957), “What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.” Vithanage follows that dictum, with the titles he gives to his films, which speak to the postmodern conundrum — a yearning for an ‘idealised’ past — in South Asia.

What Vithanage does with the red herring of his film’s symbolic title, Paradise, and with the film itself, he upends the specious idea proposed by the film’s title and established by the film’s gorgeous geographical setting, and makes his narrative reach a nightmarish crescendo, achieved by the female protagonist’s unforeseen stupefying metamorphosis. Darshana Rajendran’s diminutive, calm, observant and absorbent Amrita’s unleashing of the storm within to prevent the tempest without is a story of all times, and will remain relevant for all times. It is the woman’s story and also a nation’s story, where both suffer at the hands of wrong calls taken by men (the socially-ascribed powerful), whether it’s her husband Keshav (Roshan Mathew) or the police officer, who’s a statist tool of oppression of the marginalised.

Paradise cast and acting

The veteran Sri Lankan actors, the irate Mahendra Perera and reticent Shyam Fernando, are superb and equally good are the Malayalee leads. The quiet gravitas and dependability of Darshana Rajendran and Roshan Mathew offer directors the chance to push the envelope. If Roshan makes the macho soft (Kappela, Moothon, C U Soon, Darlings), Darshana makes the soft land punches (Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey; Purusha Pretham). Here is a blinkered, self-centred man and his curious wife.

Keshav isn’t black or white, but the refracted rays of seeing the human nature is Vithanage’s métier. A young, not yet financially settled in life, Keshav is making a web-series green lit by a top OTT platform, and his life’s motive comes from his profession, throughout this anniversary trip, he’s preoccupied with his work and his belongings. But like Lord Krishna, he is lovable, too. Amrita is not settled professionally, maybe she had ambitions to become a novelist or a journalist, but now is a blogger and dependent on her husband. And yet, she has agency and makes her voice heard. The chemistry between the two is rhythmic, each responding to the external stimuli in their own way.

Paradise and probing the male psyche

A still from the film.

A still from the film.

Vithanage who probes the male psyche in his films, layers the man-woman relationship in Paradise with the Ramayana in his modern-day take, as the paradise turns into a willing exile, Amrita’s Sita is quietly, and subconsciously, vanquishing the evil that is ego, seen in all men, in Rama and Ravana, and Keshav is both. She, unlike Sita, spots a deer but stops Keshav from killing it.

While Keshav, another name for Lord Krishna, shows the fallibility of men, whether mortal or divine, Amrita, the ambrosia of the gods that bestows immortality, will stand the test of time. Amrita, who’s surrounded by diverse men: her husband, the hotel staff, the car driver-cum-travel guide, the police officer, and the mob, holds her own. Amrita, who is not yet a mother, is a good comparative study with the only other woman whom we see for a split-second as a Tamil estate-worker’s mother who cries over her lost/dead adult-child.

Paradise as a travel film

Shyam Fernando (left) and Roshan Mathew in a still from the film.

Shyam Fernando (left) and Roshan Mathew in a still from the film.

Paradise is at once a travel film, a human-story film, a social drama, a love story, a mythological film, a woman’s story. Ramayana tours are organised in Sri Lanka. Many Indian tourists come to visit these sacred places mentioned in the epic. Vithanage shows a Sri Lanka, where tourists are welcome for their economy much as the gas shortage brought even the upper middle classes on to the streets. The ethnic polarisation is an age-old one. One that Vithanage has witnessed while growing up, during the Civil War, but as a filmmaker, he is able to break free of the shackles of history and his own biases and emotions, much like the tender tour guide-cum-driver Andrew, played by Vithanage’s regular actor Shyam Fernando, who lends a willing ear to contrarian views. He, like Vithanage’s film, stays objective. There should be an objective truth to art, the point on which its creator and its spectator can agree on.

Paradise and Many Ramayanas

If those on this side of the Palk Strait believe Rama killed Ravana to avenge Sita’s abduction and his hurt pride. Those on the other side believe Ravana is the greatest king and he was innocent, that he abducted Sita because his sister Surpanakha was attacked by Lakshmana. All these stories are there in the Ramayana and as is evinced in its many iterations — 300 versions as Amrita tells Andrew — from Kamban’s to Valmiki’s and AK Ramanujan’s, there cannot be a single narrative, for mythology, unlike history, is not the statement of a fact but is open to interpretations.

Vithanage also shows how a filmmaker must inculcate a temperament of inquiry and maintain a critical distance to engage with mythology and history, without taking a side or proclaiming it as the ultimate truth. This probing eye of an artist, which is also self-reflective, separates and elevates a piece of art from propaganda cinema. The message lies in the method, in the silences and absences, in what is neither shown nor spoken. Vithanage’s cinema, to quote Barthes again, is like a “myth” which “hides nothing and flaunts nothing…(it) is neither a lie nor a confession, it is an inflection” and “transforms history into nature”, into human nature.

Paradise cinematography and editing

A still from the film.

A still from the film.

With Paradise, Malayalee cinematographer Rajeev Ravi (Dev. D, Gangs of Wasseypur, Bombay Velvet, Thuramukham) has held the lens for the second time for Vithanage after Gaadi (Children of the Sun, 2019), the story of outcastes. Barthes wrote, “...photography is an ellipse of language and a condensation of an ‘ineffable’ society...” and Rajeev’s lens captures ‘nature’ exquisitely. If the deer in its environ and Amrita’s wonderment seeing the sublime rock on which Ravana’s chariot is said to have landed has the quality of a nature/wildlife documentary, the play of light and shadow on the characters’ faces emote the internal dilemmas and the imminent external danger. The film has been tautly and fluidly edited by Mani Ratnam’s go-to man Sreekar Prasad (RRR, Alaipayuthey, Guru, Yuva, Ponniyin Selvan, Kaminey).

Paradise and the reflection of a sensitive filmmaker

Vithanage’s cinema is emblematic of that oft used phrase: soft power. It is both soft, subtle, tender and it is powerful. It’s eloquent and effective. And it is an incontrovertible fact that the fact-based fiction Vithanage fashions makes him stand out as a distinguished director and a compelling storyteller of our times.