Phallic symbols and graveyard humour - a breakthrough for Lankan film industry?

A still from the film

Much of the time, we are looking at a dead body or a coffin. That’s macabre. It is graveyard humour, but the laughter can’t be suppressed

This is a big breakthrough and a first for our film industry

The danger is that our filmmakers could now start believing that ‘erotic’ themes are the best way to sell a film

Ilango Ram’s ‘Nelum Kuluna’ (Tentigo) looks like the shot in the arm the limping Sri Lankan film industry needs just now – but it could be sending the wrong message. The name itself is a satirical take on the Chinese-built monolithic tower which dominates Colombo’s skylight from all angles. It looks like a phallic symbol. Ram’s film, too, is replete with phallic symbols on a smaller scale – from the erect penis of a dead man to the crank handle of his ancient Austin car that won’t start.

In this context, even the bottles of arack we see often as the story unfolds too, can be seen as phallic symbols. Whether ‘Nelum Kuluna’ is an exploration of male sexual inadequacies or that of irrational behaviour when faced with a man-made crisis, it is a rib-ticking comedy. In terms of laughs per minute, it could well be the best comedy made in this country thus far. 

This is good news because comedy has been on the wane steadily since the 1960s, when we had comic talents such as D. R. Nanayakkara, Joe Abeywickrema, Anthony C. Perera, Don Sirisena and Freddie Silva. Their successors from the 1960s on have been less successful, and comedy has been usurped by the stage, often with mediocre results. 

Two unusual things 

There are two unusual things about this comedy – it has no recognizable stars, or comedians, and the theme is macabre. The story revolves around a man who dies in his sleep. His son discovers the body with an erect penis, and it gets funnier and funnier as the family desperately tries to hide this embarrassing fact from visitors, and seek ways to ‘normalise’ the erect penis.

Much of the time, we are looking at a dead body or a coffin. That’s macabre. It’s graveyard humour, but the laughter can’t be suppressed.

I wrote at the start that the spectacular success of Ilango Ram’s film could be sending the wrong message to our film industry. Even before it’s local release, ‘Nelum Kuluna’ has won a jury prize abroad, and filmmakers in India and South Korea are interested in re-making this film in their countries (in Malayali, Hindi and Korean).

Director Ilango 

This is a big breakthrough and a first for our film industry. It’s rare for Asian films to be remade (or copied) even in Asia. One exception was Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, which Hollywood re-made as The Magnificent Seven. Usually, our filmmakers copy Indian films. Now, Indian filmmakers want to re-make Nelum Kuluna in India. That’s a quantum leap forward for Sri Lanka.

The danger is that our filmmakers could now start believing that ‘erotic’ themes are the best way to sell a film, starting a cinematic cult of lingam worship.  But ‘Nelum Kuluna’ would be a hard act to follow. It has nothing erotic in the conventional sense – women in various stages of undress, sex or nudity. But an erect penis, even when covered with cloth, which may be called erotic only in a macabre, necrophelic sense. 

Nonetheless, that could be used as a ‘starting point’ or ‘reference point’ for filmmakers who want to cash in on this film’s success, necessity being the mother of invention. 

Forget lingams and phallic symbols. The success of Dharma Yuddhaya (copy of a Malayali film) shows that even the word sex is enough to draw box office crowds. It’s a story of a girl threatened with blackmail over some embarrassing images taken with a phone. No sex or nudity is shown, but the mere suggestion of a scandal was enough to draw crowds.

The main reason why our films can’t be exported to India is technical. If we take the average Tamil, Malayali, or Hindi film, they are technically of a high standard, and created around special effects (heroes fly through the air, buildings and boulders are smashed with one blow, etc). Special effects are a must for historical epics, children’s films and adventure stories. Our filmmakers don’t have the money for this.

This is where Ilango Ram’s film stands out. It has a budget look and no special effects. It doesn’t have star appeal. The only star is Dilhani Ekanayake, but her star days were two decades back. All characters look very ordinary. Hence, the film owes its success to the power of the story (written by the director himself), and accurate casting. The characters played by Priyantha Sirikumara, Chandani Seneviratna, Kaushalya Fernando, Thusitha Laknath and others are all very well played. It’s ghoulish humour. It’s not a comedy I want to see again. I’ve been to too many funerals recently to spend one and half hours staring at a corpse. But that should not prevent anyone from seeing ‘Nelum Kuluna’ which is wickedly funny.

I say wicked because it is an accurate and merciless portrait of contemporary Sri Lankan society, full of drunks and superstitious, irrational behaviour. When the doctor says the only way to remove the offending erect penis is to cut it, the mother objects, and suggests the services of an exorcist. The way people bond through alcohol is shown with a sociologist’s dispassionate eye. In a country where politicians bribe schoolchildren and parents with ‘charmed’ pens, it’s no wonder that democracy is a runaway train. 

This may be the underlying political message of ‘Nelum Kuluna.’ It’s socio-political satire of a ghoulish kind. This is a taboo-breaking film, but I wonder if the filmmaker has gone too far when two of his female characters discuss the size of the dead man’s penis. Or is it that I am a prude and anything goes these days in film making?

We learn that the father has died while watching a ‘Sunny Leone porn film.’ It’s hard to understand why he used the name of Sunny Leone instead of saying ‘a porn film.’ For those who don’t know, Sunny Leone is a Canadian-Indian film star whose career started in Canada as a porn star. But after she was invited to host a MTV event in India, she decided to shift with her American husband (her co-star in porn films) to India and work in the mainstream film industry. She was given only B-movies for a long time. But, after Shah Rukh Khan featured her in a dance scene in one of his movies, she broke into the mainstream and is now a top film star. It’s an achievement to be respected.

It’s hard to say if Ilango Ram was paying her a backhanded compliment. If so, it’s the only one of its kind in this film. Everyone else is getting slapped hard as drunks, gossips, liars, eavesdroppers and porn addicts. It’s not a flattering portrait of our society.

It takes courage to make a film like that.

Director Ilango (left) and producer Hiranya Perera