I saw Vimukthi Jayasundara’s The Forsaken Land at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival. I’m not sure if it ever received a theatrical release outside of New York City, and it’s not on any DVD with English subtitles. I attempted to refresh my memory of it by perusing the user comments at imdb, but I found only four reviews, one of which summarizes the film with an “Ouch!” and another of which informs me that “there are certain films which are praised by critics for reasons unknown to the general public. This is precisely the case with this film.” So you’ll forgive me if my description is hazy or my ranking misguided. But forward I go…
Set in the midst of Sri Lanka’s endless civil war, the film construes this endless state of war as an existential malaise par excellence. The protagonist is awakened in the middle of the night and instructed to bludgeon to death a man whose face is never shown. The one character that seems to maintain a quiet Sisyphean struggle against the absurd for most of the film ends her own life somewhere just over the upper edge of the frame. With almost no dialogue, long, distancing shots, and a recurring motif of a tank moving through a mist-shrouded field, its gun swivelling about to aim at nothing, the narrative’s disjointed absurdities are presented in a mood of static despair. If human experience is a movement—and it is—Jayasundara presents us with a state of living in which that movement is from nowhere and toward nothing. The past and future are dissolved; the war and the characters’ lives within it are a single monotony forever returning to itself, with no origin, history, or goals. Bereft of any historicity, the characters drift in a state of emptiness; without the meaningful context of past and future, they are alienated from their present, only marginally engaged with their own lives, continuing forward simply out of habit.
