overblik
A masterwork of Sri Lankan cinema, this moving saga of family and class conflict was made by Lester James Peries, his country’s foremost filmmaker and a director much admired by India’s Satyajit Ray.
Gamperaliya is regarded as a cornerstone of Sri Lankan cinema, launching upon its release in 1964 ‘a revolution, not only in the way films were made, but also in the content,’ according to producer Anton Wickramasinghe.
Peries sought an alternative to the Bollywood-influenced melodramas that dominated Sri Lanka’s commercial cinema, writing stories that looked at the staple issues of melodrama in a more nuanced way.
The film, adapted from a novel by Martin Wickramasinghe, focuses on Piyal, a teacher and member of the new rising middle class, who falls in love with the daughter of his village’s leading aristocratic clan; the girl’s parents insist upon a marriage to a stuffed shirt of her own class, one that shifting social forces are already rendering obsolete.
Gamperaliya is filmed in an elegant and uncoercive narrative style that has been compared to Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy; its aesthetic choices also have a moral dimension: at every level, this is a movie about the importance of setting aside illusion and exaggeration and seeing things as they are.