I understand that the intentions behind the production of the Sinhalese movie Gamani were all good. Giving the public a good shot of patriotism, in a post-war era, presented in the form of an easily-comprehensible straight lined plot about team work in the face of the enemy is a good idea. But when that idea is (badly) camaflouged in a comdey it's purpose becomes overrun.
The movie started about an hour late as the earlier shows had dragged on. We were sitting in the cinema for a solid two hours, drifting between brutal scenes of slaughter- swords flinging, blood spilling- and lewd laughter. At one point I was laughing so hard (not the good kind of laughter evoked by witticism, but the oh-my-god-these-fricking-morons! type of laughter, almost bordering the American Pie-type of ridiculousness) and suddenly there was a scene of a man who had hanged himself. I, together with about half of the audience, continued to laugh through the first minute of that scene out of mere confusion. The juxtaposition of brutality and idiocy is such.
I woke up the next morning and tried to think of what I had seen. On my bus ride to work, I tried to untangle the mess of characters and sub-plots. My confusion only went from bad to worse. I remember something about a gramarakshaka (scout appointed during war times to protect villages) and his girlfriend who was hacked to death and another
gramarakshaka and his girlfriend who slapped him for hugging girls. There was a small Tamil girl whose brother was a terrorist, another small girl whose brother was killed by the terrorists and another girl? A monk, a teacher, an angan (Sri Lankan martial arts) fighter, a man who lost his family etc. etc. and some of these characters simply trailed off somewhere mid-plot.
This is probably a bad review, heck, this is not a review at all. That's simply because I couldn't be bothered writing a 'review' about a movie as juvenile as Gamani. But to give at least one or two words of encouragement for anyone who still insists on watching this- there were one or two explosions, and for Sri Lankan cinema, that in itself is a mini-achievement. Some of the fighting scenes and the blood and effects were also commendable. May be if they hired a qualified editor and scriptwriter the explosives could have been put to some use.
