Dhaka 2008

"Sankara":
A Screen Meditation
By Salome Kikaleishvili

Prasanna Jayakody, director of the movie Sankara, on his film:

This is my debut. It's Sankara.
    The meaning of the word "sankara" is what we dispose of, dirt, or in ordinary sense passion. Sankara has been created to talk about the "klesha" (as said above, passion) and the man whose sufferings are caused by passion or "klesha".
    The basis to any discussion of life, according to the philosophy that guides an artist, I believe has two dimensions: Materialistic life and spiritual life.
    Though we base our lives upon the materialistic world, there is no eternal truth in that. I feel that there is no difference between the materialistic life and the dreams we see.
    If there is one thing that is not materialistic in life, that is the mind. We do not know whether the mind exists inside or outside the body. But the eternal wanderer's existence lies within the mind.
    If one speaks about life, is there any purpose in discussing external trivialities that could be perceived by the eyes? The answer is no, because there is a deeper sense to life than what we see through our eyes. This is why I decided to analyze the mind through Sankara. Mind is something that exists between existence and non-existence. The mind lies within and depends upon passions, the klesha. They are born out of the desires of five senses, i.e. sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing; these five senses can be called "five causal elements" (pancha upaadaana skandla).
    The question of my film is: How can a young reverend with propensities for life's desires detach himself from them? Though I did not try to give any message through Sankara , the film expresses how man suffers in life, and I attempted to make the spectators feel what man experiences when he transcends earthly life and reaches the spiritual.

Prasanna Jayakody was born in 1968 to an artistic family strongly rooted in traditional Sinhala values, and grew up in a Buddhist environment. Maybe this is the reason why his first movie, Sankara, is so infused with Buddhist philosophy, where the inner world of the main hero, a Buddhist monk, is shown through changes of mystic landscapes, attention to nature and expressing love for its beauty. There is almost no dialogue; one hears only the rustling of leaves, the trickling of drops of water, chirping of birds. One sees only Buddhist frescoes, inside and outside the temples. Everything — the picture and the sound — succumbs to meditation. Indeed, the movie itself seems to become a meditation, where there is no time, but instead an infinite space, beautiful and magnetic, tempting and charming.

"Sankara"

A young monk arrives in a village to restore some frescoes in a small temple. These frescoes tell the story of Thelapaththa Jathakaya, where the Buddha says that a man with a great goal for his life should not succumb to feelings of passion; that he should not be defeated by his five feelings, especially as they convey the love of a beautiful woman. But is it possible, when you see her, when your skin feels the light wisp of a cool breeze, when you touch a naked body on a fresco. When all your instinctive thoughts are free and exposed? The rhythm of this movie is slow — it subscribes to the Buddhist concept of time's irrelevance — and its pace unhurried. Nobody tells us a story, there is no conventional narrative. No knots are tied.

The movie follows the monk as he works tirelessly on a restoration of old frescoes, attending to each and every detail. And then, one day, he finds a woman's hairpin. Admiring it, he tells no one, hiding away this little gold pin and the invisible feeling it has awakened within him. He watches the woman comb her hair, listens when she touches the sugar-cane leaves, feels with his skin the drops of water falling from her hair — but this is voluptuousness, physical passion, which bursts into his world, overwhelming the safe harbour of his mind with this small trinket. The whole movie is filled with such symbols, and only by looking deeply into all of them can we understand the screen meditation of the Sri Lankan director.

There is one more hero in this movie. This strange character appears first when we are watching the very first shots of the movie. We see a fork in a road — literally, a crossroads — where the hero of the movie gets out of a car with the stranger. This is his alter ego , his instinctive self. He follows the monk like a shadow, but is able to do much more than his spiritual counterpart. While the monk is working on frescoes, he can go and meander endlessly in a green forest (which once again, according to the Buddhist philosophy, is the symbol of "samsara" or eternity), or visit a woman; when the monk is swimming in the river and sees a woman passing by, his other self can follow her and from the tall grass watch the bathing woman, "touch" with his eye her naked body. But this is not a foreign matter; these are the dual passions of human nature, the spiritual and the physical, always existing simultaneously and in opposition present to one another. These two characters are elements of one human being, torn in two!

When someone damages the restored frescoes, the monk has to start his work anew, extending his stay in the village. In a temple filled with people who've come to see this barbaric act, he conceals the hairpin with his foot — a hairpin, smeared with cement and paint, evidence of a crime left behind by a mysterious offender. Who committed this act? Nobody knows. Maybe it was the monk himself, his alter ego having taken solid form...

But it does not matter. At the end everything is clear. The monk is seen at the restored frescoes, walking along the wall and scratching them with the same hairpin in his hand, marking his life as a long white line on a story of Buddha, which tells us, that if one is to achieve one's goals in life, one cannot succumb to the five passions. In the last five to ten minutes of the movie, the camera shows only frescoes, close-ups and panoramic shots of women's bodies; the shots are clear, and sometimes the passion makes them blurry.

Several times, while watching the movie, I was dazzled by the rays of the sun filtering through the leaves as the main hero walked in the woods, through eternity. This detail reminded me of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon , the movie with an eternal question: Where is the truth? Where do we have to look for it? And the answer: Again and again, in our own selves!

Salome Kikaleishvili
© FIPRESCI 2008

Salome Kikaleishvili was born in 1980 in Tbilisi, Georgia. She graduated from Tbilisi State University's faculty of film criticism in 2000. She is the executive editor of "Cinema", the first Georgian cinema magazine, and a contributor to the magazine "Tsxeli Shokoladi", writing movie reviews, festival reports and interviews. She is also a lecturer of cinema history at the Tbilisi State Academy of Fine Arts.

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