Between Two Worlds

Sri Lanka's civil conflict raged so furiously for twenty-six long years that when it was declared over, one of the main reactions was numb disbelief. Director Vimukthi Jayasundara last explored the hollow absurdities of his homeland's war in The Forsaken Land. Four years later, the fighting has stopped but the stark symbols of war are not so easily erased. Because Jayasundara is at heart a symbolist, Between Two Worlds never sets out to explain the conflict, but it does illuminate it.

A man washes up on the shore and makes his way into a rioting city. He rescues a foreign woman, and they begin travelling out to the hills. But instead of refuge, the countryside reveals increasing menace. What begins as enigmatic soon moves to unsettling, then descends into the stark stabs of violence particular to civil war.

Jayasundara is always alive to the unique nature of his setting. Shooting in widescreen compositions that show off the area's lush green vistas to sublime effect, he conjures up images that haunt this beauty – military helicopters sweeping over the landscape, a dog feasting on a cow. Here he expands and deepens the absurdist quality he brought to The Forsaken Land. Our protagonist witnesses a van plunge madly into a lake, but when he arrives at the shore, an old man swimming there insists the incident is ancient history. “It's possible you just saw something that happened a long time ago,” he says.

Jayasundara's Sri Lanka is a mythic place where war has collapsed the space between past and present, has militarized traditional rituals and, perhaps worst of all, has made the mute witnessing of horror an everyday act. What elevates his filmmaking from commentary to art is the sophistication of his symbolism and his fluid, graceful articulation of pain.

107cine(创建者)