Readers Write In #755: Paradise, Teacher’s Lounge, and the myth of an “arty” film

By Karthik Amarnath

I’ve been avoiding all the “arty” films on my watch list. And I’ve been giving myself all the usual excuses. You know, about time, life, foreign language. Plus the fact that escapist fare is just easy on your senses. Like a plate of pakodas. Even with grimier frames and bloated body counts, watching mainstream films is low-effort, and with the right company, enjoyable. But when it comes to a festival film, say like Paradise thats about a couple vacationing in a volatile nation? Well, then the nosy questions come crawling out. Like, where am I going to source this film from? Or, when am I going to find the time this week? How will I move my personal and professional commitments into the sixth planetary position occupied by Jupiter and Neptune?

The irony is that I love the “arty” films. These are the films that I keep thinking about even weeks after I’ve watched them. And sourcing them has never been easier. But the real challenge has always been to get past a certain kind of mental inertia. You know, from all those life questions you cant answer, and those nebulous chunks of disquiet that keep building up in the back of the mind, bit by bit everyday like a calcite deposit. This isn’t so much of an issue when watching mainstream films, since our mental baggage is safely stowed away, like we’re passengers on an airplane. But to watch an alternate film is to be pushed out of a plane like a novice paratrooper not knowing what wilderness awaits. There’s a sense of adventure, but even the lightest of life’s baggage can feel burdensome.

Anyhow, a couple of weeks ago, there was a sizeable breach in my mental space-time continuum, and I ended up watching not one but two films off-the-beaten track, one of which was Prasanna Vithanage’s Paradise. Within two minutes of Paradise, you know the kind of film you’re in for. The opening is just a black screen, with three short messages, about the economic turmoil in Sri Lanka, about it’s rising social unrest, and about the dip in tourism. We cut to the title, and a colorful infomercial plays off an iPad, of different tourist spots in Sri Lanka, places that have mythological significance from the Ramayana. There’s a blink-and-you-miss image of many Ramayana books thrown together. All through, on the iPad screen, we see a faint silhouette of the person watching the video. That’s our introduction to Roshan Matthew’s Keshav, who’s riding in a car. He answers a short phone call, and looks at his wife, Amritha, played by Darshana Rajendran. “We’ll soon know the outcome of what we’ve worked on for two years,” he says. They smile at each other. His eyes widen, as he looks forward to whats next. Her eyes close, as she soaks in their warmth, basking in the pleasure of their journey. That two minute opening is all the setup we get, and it ties together the three major threads in this film— the socio-political situation in Srilanka, the mythology of Ramayana, and the married couple. The rest of the film is about how all of this unravels over the span of two days.

The title Paradise, as you might have guessed, is misleading by design. Its a decoy to draw you in. It’s like a colorful infomercial. It’s like the golden deer in Ramayana that lures Seetha. It’s like the iconic Madras Talkies logo that opens this film, and lures you into thinking that a film backed by the great bastion of mainstream Tamil cinema might share some of its crowd-pleasing sensibilities.  But Paradise is not that kind of film. It’s not going to give us something easy or pleasing to hold on to. We know this in the very second scene, when Keshav, Amrita and their tour guide Mr. Andrew (Sri lankan actor Shyam Fernando, who played King Mahinda in PS-1), visit a beautiful waterfall. Amrita shows the view to her mother over the phone, and assures her of how safe the place is. Moments later we see Keshav, Amrita and Mr. Andrew enter a cave, the telling visual being the trio in dark silhouettes framed by the cave opening, as though they are being swallowed by a giant beast. The cave, Mr. Andrew says, is a mythical abode of a sleeping Ravana, who, people believe, will awaken one day to avenge Lanka. 

The awakening of a long dormant force, one that manifests like Ravana, as an “evil” force, is one of the key metaphors to see this film. We will see this within the larger sociopolitical context, but also within the smaller marital relationship between Keshav and Amritha. And just like the epic, the seeds of conflict are sown with the sight of a deer, a magnificent stag that draws the interest of Keshav and Amrita. We see how this brings out the difference between characters. For Keshav, its a means to express his power, as he wants to hunt it, for venison. For Amritha, its a thing of beauty that she wants to admire, like a pet. Mr. Andrew does what is asked of him, first by Keshav, and later by Amritha.  

Now it might be tempting to connect the trio to Rama, Sita and Lakshmana. After all, the film centers on this trio and their experiences in a forest-like wilderness. But this perception doesnt stick, and it is not meant to. The bigger point of the film is that these characters, both in the film and in the epic, are not set in stone. With time and distance every character feels different. Every relationship feels different. Every story feels different. Like that blink-and-you-miss image of many Ramayana books thrown together, we all have our versions of every story, be it the epic, or even our own. 

And so it is with this film too. The “story” if you’re looking for one, really depends on how you see it. You could see it as a breakdown of a marriage. Or you could see it as a clash between a tourism-dependent state and an socio-economically deprived populace. Or you could see it as a subversive retelling of the Ramayana, in a manner of another Madras Talkies film, Mani Ratnam’s Raavanan. Unlike that film though, the Ravana in Paradise is not a character, but an abstraction, for long simmering tensions that are about to explode. And the Sita here isnt abducted literally but is drawn emotionally away from her husband— a man who exerts his “power” as a tourist over the helpless Sri Lankan authorities. And she’s drawn towards the suffering of the (Sri) Lankans. 

In Mani Ratnam’s Raavanan— festival credentials notwithstanding— the filmmaking is deliberately mainstream. There’s music and dance, and songs like Kalvare and UsurePogudhey whose lyrical depth and stylized visuals take us into the longing and love of the Rama and Ravana characters. In contrast, the filmmaking in Paradise keeps us at a distance. Although we are constantly with Keshav and Amritha, there’s a detachment in how we see them. Take the scene where they celebrate five years of being together. They sit on opposite sides of a dining table, a candelabra splitting them in the frame, and they drink a glass of champagne. “To us,” she says, with a quiet formality, like one would in a public gathering with friends and acquaintances, rather than an intimate dinner with a spouse. This distance is deliberate, denying us the luxury of getting close to the couple, or even just a character. The film also avoids all the easy highs through dramatized dialogue or colorful expressions. The lines are minimal and matter-of-fact, with long pauses that let them linger. And there is no music. 

The sounds we hear are all natural, like birds and crickets and waterfalls, and it airdrops us deep into their surroundings. Interspersed with eerie silences, this creates a palpable tension. So much so, that when we hear a character sing in the dark, it feels like a burst of otherworldly energy, and it ignites a passionate overture by Keshav. The beauty of that moment, though, is short-lived. It’s yet another decoy. What follows is an ugly theft, by masked intruders in the dark, and it sets in motion a series of events with devastating consequences.

Let me switch to the second off-the-beaten-track film I watched recently, which was Teacher’s Lounge. This is a German film, about a middle school math teacher, Carla Nowak, played by Leonie Benesch. This film is entirely set inside Carla’s school, mostly in broad daylight, with boisterous kids and gossipy teachers, a  friendly and familiar environment. For me, personally, having never left the cloistered corridors of academic life, I was right at home. And, as an immigrant educator, the doubts and insecurities of a Polish math teacher in a German school felt all too familiar. The way she gently admonishes someone for speaking to her in Polish inside the school is just the kind of thing I might have done in the early days of my career.

I know nothing about the German film industry, but I wouldn’t hesitate to call Teacher’s Lounge a mainstream film. And I have my reasons. For one, the movie plays out like a genre piece, almost like a thriller. The setups and payoffs are evident. There’s sharp words. There’s echos. There’s music, both to build tension, and to take us into the mind of the protagonist. And importantly, we get a single clear point of view throughout, that of a do good, do right, heroic math teacher.  

Now, here’s whats interesting. If we take Paradise, strip away the specifics of space and time, forget about the form, and just look at the narrative from the point of view of Amritha, then we’ll see, it actually looks no different from Teacher’s Lounge. Both are about characters in foreign lands. Both characters are witnesses to a theft— the inciting event in both the films. In both situations, there’s shaky evidence. But a perpetrator is pointed at, who happens to be from a lower strata (of society/school). In both films, we have parallel scenes where we see kids first favor and then turn against the teacher/tourist. Both characters then find themselves conflicted between the methods of the authorities, and compassion for the accused. In both scenarios, we see the situation escalate to violence. And both characters, eventually, take matters into their own hands.  

And yet only Paradise leaves you with that weird knot inside, an inability to fully explain what happened, or why. Partly, its the stakes which are much higher in Paradise. Partly, its the reality of socio-economic depression that the film puts forth. But mostly its the filmmaking. That raw natural ambience, which makes you feel like a mute spectator. The skeletal lines, with those glaring gaps that demand your interpretation. And that unsettling distance from the characters, where you’re neither too close to easily step into their shoes, nor too far to stop yourself from grappling with the morality of it all. 

Now Teacher’s Lounge also has lingering questions, especially about what happens after, but only if you care to think about it. At an emotional level, the film leaves you with the warm feeling of everything tied up together, nicely with a bow on top. It has that boomerang quality of mainstream films, where you can just walk out of the film, and get back to whatever state you were  before you got in.  This is of course not to say that Teacher’s Lounge is any less immersive, or that Paradise is any less gripping. This art-mainstream divide is subjective at best. And if anything, I’d say that both these films are knocking on the doors of that divide. Even so, when I go and look at my watchlist again, and I see “Zone of Interest” staring at me like a long neglected child, I can already feel that weird knot tighten, the unease over the wilderness that awaits, and the disquiet that I know comes after. 

Or who knows, maybe all of this is just a myth I’m making up to avoid watching another “arty” film. I am just as much a sucker for easy escapism as the person next to me. Right now, I also see Nicole Kidman’s Perfect Couple on my watch list. And it’s looking like the perfect plate of pakodas to binge, and tide over the depressing task of grading midterm papers that sit on my desk.