Reviewing the Coen brothers’ film Fargo Roger Ebert wrote, ‘films like Fargo are why I love the movies’. While watching Uberto Pasolini’s brilliant Machan I understood why Ebert, usually so stoic in his reviews, let his guard down in reviewing that film. Fargo was a movie for the ages – a brilliant parable about people resorting to the far-fetched and absurd when they find themselves cornered and utterly helpless. With Machan, Pasolini and writer Ruwanthie De Chickera tackle similar themes in the Sri Lankan context, more precisely the lengths some Sri Lankans would go to in order to migrate to Europe in search of greener pastures.
Pasolini produced Full Monty, a movie that made me laugh so hard my family thought I had finally gone insane. Indeed watching Machan’s first act unfold, it was hard not to notice the parallels: like Gaz and his buddy Dave in Full Monty, Stanley and Manoj are out of luck, regularly getting rejected at the embassies of nations they long to work in. Both sets of men then chance upon a scheme that, they believe, can’t fail: Gaz and Dave turn to the exotic world of male stripping, Stanley and Manoj turn to handball. What is handball, I hear you ask. In Stanley’s words: “Nobody fucking knows!” In reality it seems like basketball and football’s illegitimate child.
The script has an old world charm, an almost Chaplin-esque sense of comedy and timing that is all too rare in this day and age of toilet humor and vomit jokes. It is also unabashedly Sri Lanka and audiences will leave the theater with a newfound vocabulary. I had no idea that so many synonyms existed for the word ‘fuck’ in the Sinhala lexicon. Parents, ye be warned.
But what really raises this script from good to almost great is De Chickera’s complete mastery of giving each character a voice and presence regardless of their significance in the narrative. A scene involving a grave digger may go down as my favorite of the year. The scene swings from hilarious to deeply melancholic with such ease that I had to restrain myself from clapping at what De Chickera had just achieved.
The acting is top class. Some of the most storied names in Sinhala cinema and theater – Irangani Serasinghe and Malini Fonseka among them – along with their counterparts from Tamil and English theater, come together to form the ensemble. They are uniformly excellent. There is also a tangible lack of ego in the casting for this movie: the bigger, better known members of the cast occupy smaller roles while the relative new comers take on the bigger roles. Dharmapriya Dias steals the show with his portrayal as the dim-witted Stanley.
Even the peripheral characters – the policemen, the “foreign cattle”, and Stanley’s carefree, race horse-betting aunts (Serasinghe is absolutely brilliant as one of them: she dismisses her nephew’s complaints about the suddenly missing roof by saying, ‘But now I can see the stars and it is cooler too!’) are beautifully fleshed out. If I had to nitpick, I’d just say that Gihan De Chickera wasn’t the most suitable choice for Manoj. While his performance was solid, he wasn’t as convincing as the rest of the cast.
None of this would have been as effective if the film was shot in some swanky studio set. Pasolini instead opts for the most realistic setting and you are left with moments of intense humor juxtaposed with silent social commentary on the rampant poverty that drives people to such audacious scheming. Therein lies Machan’s brilliance: It is at once a feel good story, a laugh out loud comedy and a social commentary, and remarkably scores high on each of those counts.
To the cast and crew behind Machan: a sincere thank you.
4 Comments
November 10, 2008 at 9:59 am
exactly! this is pretty much what i’d say had i written anything on machan. i thought gehan seemed to not be able to connect with his character as much as the others. Dharmapriya Dias was superb. So was Mahendra Perera (I loved the way he told the German Immigration guy to fuck himself in Sinhala with a big smile on his face)
and like you say, it was nice to see the big actors not overshadowing the characters. i hope people go watch this.
November 11, 2008 at 10:26 am
Great review too. You should publish it.
December 26, 2008 at 9:32 pm
[...] I’m no good with reviews – specially in the filmic high on getting back from the theatre. Theena has a review which sums up what I feel about Uberto Pasolini’s entertaining Euro-Sri Lankan production. [...]
January 3, 2009 at 2:04 am
Hi ! A better review I am yet to see ! Those so called scribes could maybe learn a lesson or two on penning an unbiased critique from this one !
Do they intend extending Machang’s run ? Sure Hope so!