‘Paradise’: Busan Review

Dir: Prasanna Vithanage. Sri Lanka/India. 2023. 92mins

There’s no better time to visit a county than when it’s imploding. That’s the view, at least, of brash, hard-skinned Indian TV content provider Kesav, who, in April 2022, takes his young wife Amritha for a fifth wedding anniversary break in the island ‘paradise’ of Sri Lanka. “It’s much cheaper to come now,” he tells her, “we’re doing them a favour by being here”.

A well-made drama buoyed up by a raft of fine performances

As one of the opening titles of veteran Sri Lankan director Prasanna Vithanage’s 11th feature reminds us, this was a time when the country was bankrupt, basic necessities were running out or impossible to afford, and protestors had taken to the streets. Tourism, one of the mainstays of the South Asian nation’s economy, was collapsing as visitors cancelled their holidays.

With dialogue in Malayalam, English and Sinhalese, the film played in the Kim Jiseok section for established Asian directors at this year’s Busan festival, and was the deserved recipient of one of the two equal cash prizes on offer in the sidebar. Moving through the narrative with admirable dexterity, despite some contrived passages, it’s a well-made drama buoyed up by a raft of fine performances. It will certainly attract further festival play, and could end up securing distribution beyond its home markets.

The fact that Roshan Mathew’s Kesav and Darshana Rajendran’s Amritha are Indian, like many of Sri Lanka’s affluent incoming visitors, lends extra resonance to Vithanage’s story of an anniversary break that takes a wrong turn and never finds its way back. Paradise is about a tragedy that happens at least in part due to the fissures that have opened up between people with a shared culture. But it’s also about a gulf that forms between a married couple, when a robbery and its aftermath bring out conflicts and differences that otherwise might have lain buried for years.

As he and his blogger wife begin to tour sites associated with the great Indian epic the Ramayana, Kesav receives the phone call he has been waiting for, telling him that his pitch to Netflix for an Indian version of Squid Game has been accepted. His offhand attitude to ‘Mr Andrew’ (Shyam Fernando), the couple’s Sri Lankan guide and driver is an irritant, but the full extent of the smug TV producer’s callousness is only revealed in small incremental steps. This means the audience is always just a little ahead of Amritha in seeing who he really is. Her devotion to her man and happiness for his success makes the inner struggle when the scales begin to fall from her eyes all the more affecting, thanks also to Rajendran’s warm, natural performance.

The dramatic pivot comes when the couple are robbed while staying in a country lodge – one of those that come complete with servant and cook, who share their meals downstairs with Mr Andrew. Perhaps it was a little too obvious to make Mr Andrew a Christian, Shree the servant boy a Tamil and Iqbal the cook a Muslim, but it does work to expose the tensions and underlying racism at play in Sri Lanka. Sergeant Bandara (veteran actor Mahendra Perera) has no hesitation in abusing his power when Kesav reports the theft of his tablet and iPhone. He will round up the usual suspects, all of them poor Tamils who work on a nearby tea estate.

Paradise is set in southern Sri Lankan hill country, with its great mountain vistas, waterfalls and ancient temples. It’s beautifully shot, though there’s a melancholy, even sinister edge to all those misty woods and dripping undergrowth. The grandeur of this natural landscape is set against the ugliness of a society ravaged by corruption, inter-ethnic strife and economic disaster, but the two things are also shown to be fatefully entwined. If the tourists who come to look at those beautiful landscapes weren’t so precious in April 2022 – something the bullying Kesav has no hesitation in reminding the police sergeant – maybe the pressure to find a culprit wouldn’t have been so great, and maybe this anniversary trip wouldn’t have set this couple face to face with the very ugliness they were meant to be shielded from.

There’s another strand to Vithanage’s supple feature that Indian and Sri Lankan audiences will pick up on, one that revolves around the Ramayama itself. This ancient epic narrates (among other things) the abduction of prince Rama’s lovely, devoted wife Sita by the dastardly King Ravana of Lanka. There’s a deer that looms large both in the epic and film, but more importantly, as Amritha tells Mr Andrew during a temple visit, there are alternative versions of the epic in which Sita isn’t such a helpless heroine waiting for a man to save her. The finale – in which the mild-mannered Mr Andrew suddenly plays a crucial role ­– laces this alternative reading with a deadly irony.