SFIFF53: Between Two Worlds

Sri Lankan director Vimukthi Jayasundara's third film about the civil war, Between Two Worlds, is (as the title suggests) a study in ambiguity, division and chaos. Affairs are violently disordered and because there is a sort of temporal rupture operating throughout we encounter violence from times past as well. Between scenes of riot in the modern city near the beginning of the film and a savage attack by machete-wielding warriors on horseback at the end, the imaginative space of this film is defined by its random exposure to assault on every level. It is a fluid, disconcerting environment which conditions personal life as much as social; the central character is moved in a seemingly arbitrary way to expressions of both tenderness and savagery (most notably, in one scene, toward the same person at the same time) as he struggles to find a context for his own wildly fluctuating impulses. This character is something of a puzzle in and to himself - we gather from stories told by fishermen that he is the reincarnation of a figure in Sri Lankan originary myth who is born of a virgin and raised by the sea, but he is also a contemporary individual with a history and family and village of origin in this world. His thoroughly uncanny character is developed in weird, disconnected episodes which, as Jayasundara explained in the Q and A, are best understood as visual puzzles. We encounter him falling from a great height into the sea at the beginning of the film, so his otherwordly character is established from the outset, but then we see him beating a man who is dressed as Mickey Mouse on a street littered with smashed computers, which is disorienting to say the least. He escapes to lush country, he sees visions, he surrenders, he sleeps, he makes love, he fights, he hides in a tree ... It is images like this latter one, which conform to the shape of the myth, that help to clue us in to the fact that the spatial and temporal disconnects we keep running into are probably as much a function of his own double nature, as human body and mythic embodiment (between two worlds) as they are qualities in the world at large. There is occasion amongst all this admixture and chaos for some lyrical camerawork - the scenes where his wounded eye is healed by his lover's breast milk are beautiful - but the deliberate visual discords end up abstracting events so much it is ultimately difficult to really engage emotionally. Audience members reported feeling moved, but I left feeling slightly baffled and tired.