In Prasanna Vithanage’s exquisite film, set against the Sri Lankan economic crisis, a Malayalee couple’s Ramayana tour in the idyllic island nation turns into a nightmare
It is June 2022, and an Indian couple is in Sri Lanka on a holiday. The husband, Kesav (Roshan Mathew), has his eyes and ears glued to his phone because he awaits an important call while the wife, Amritha (Darshana Rajendran), looks out the window of their rented Land Cruiser with beaming eyes. Mr. Andrew (Shyam Fernando), the local, drives the car to their Arcadian homestay atop a hill and over the next couple of days, he will also serve as their guide on this special Ramayana tour. Each site of this tour — to mark their fifth wedding anniversary — is of specific significance, he says: there’s the cave where the slain Ravana sleeps, a temple where Sita was made to take the Agnipariksha, and so on.
But before all that, before they soak up the quaintness of the place, they must first come face-to-face with the sad reality of their host nation as the car drives through streets filled with social unrest and despair. Sri Lanka has just announced bankruptcy and is seriously buckling under pressure. Resources like diesel are scarce and largely reserved for privileged tourists like Kesav and Amritha — at one point, a cop requests their taxi for a lift because his government vehicle is running empty of fuel. Even solving crime is a hassle at this point.
Sri Lankan auteur Prasanna Vithanage’s Paradise, set against the backdrop of economic crisis, is a taut drama that throws a lot at us but almost always stays secretive about its true intent. At first glance, it is about the slow unravelling of a marriage that first shows signs following an event of crime. Amritha and Kesav are robbed at knifepoint at their homestay and their phones, along with his iPad, are taken away from their room on their night of arrival. It’s a terrible start to the vacation and the paradise they sought from Sri Lanka begins to feel like a facade.
A rhythm, both comforting and disquieting
Ammu, though, remains unperturbed about the whole thing but Kesav is equally tense and annoyed because he needs at least one device to close a very important deal: Netflix has just accepted his pitch for the Indian version of Squid Games and the money he makes is important for their immediate future. So, all the setup we just saw could serve as the backdrop to a story of how a married couple sees its future being jeopardized by one petty crime.
But the film, which won the Kim Jiseok award at the 2023 Busan International Film Festival, deftly soon takes a turn and asks us to stop that thought in its tracks right away. There’s a lot more to this, says Vithanage, who has now introduced characters of various backgrounds to us, including Malayalam-speaking tourists, Sinhalese cops, ‘Estate’ Tamils and a few more, with each of them playing an important part in exposing a harsh truth. A police complaint is lodged and the region’s chief policeman, Sgt. Bandara (a superb Mahendra Perera, a Sri Lankan actor), is bullied into rounding up suspects by Kesav, who is growing frustrated, hostile and apathetic towards the locals and their existing miseries with each minute. He believes that an economically dilapidated state must lay out a red carpet for him instead of hassling him like this: “We are doing them a favour by coming here,” he tells Amritha (in English, ensuring their driver Andrew is made aware of his stance) who doesn’t subscribe to his views.
Paradise is one of those films in which nothing and everything is in your face at the same time.
Kesav’s behaviour is crude, no doubt, but you sense Amritha’s concerns surging as she encounters this side of her husband for the very first time. You see that the revelation hits her at a psychological level and this sudden disillusionment has rattled something inside which may, or may not, surface at a later crucial point in the story. Darshana Rajendran is particularly captivating in the role. On the one hand, she is asked to internalise everything her character comes across but on the other, there’s the need to subtly demonstrate everything she has processed in this complex tale. It helps that Rajeev Ravi’s trademark cinematography remains unobtrusive (just like A. Sreekar Prasad’s editing) in capturing the shifting moods and also maintaining a rhythm that’s comforting and disquieting at the same time.
A survival drama
Paradise is one of those films in which nothing and everything is in your face at the same time. It’s a superbly simple film on several accounts and yet, it withholds such depth and layering that it could be really difficult to wrap your head around all the myriad perspectives it offers. The Ramayana tour, for instance, is introduced into the narrative as an initiation course, but its frequent recurrence becomes a thing to ponder and once more, Vithanage and his screenwriting partner Anushka Senanayake leave breadcrumbs for us to trace.
Amritha’s spotting of a deer more than once is suggestive of something important and so is her constant, affable back-and-forth about the veracity of Andrew’s version of the Ramayana. She is fascinated by all his stories but also believes there are countless other, and potentially more concrete, versions of the Ramayana and his is only one of them: in another iteration, she tells him, it is Sita who kills Ravana and not Rama.
But at no point does Paradise become literal in its telling and while it teases us with all different subplots and standpoints, it stealthily builds a survival drama in the back. It tells us that as people go on unwittingly exposing their true shades, there is no better stage than that of a social crisis to highlight the hierarchy that exists among us all; and mind you, everyone is caught in this hierarchy but each is trying to survive, to subvert. At the end of it all, the small Squid Game reference right at the beginning of the film becomes incredibly valuable in understanding the essence of it all: without knowing, Kesav might have joined a ‘game’ of his own and he must either survive or surrender, but cannot afford to quit at any point.
