A special screening of Asoka Handagama’s latest feature film titled Alborada (The Dawning of the Day) was held at the Liberty Scope Cinema on 17 February 2022.
The film chronicles a fictional depiction of Chilean activist and diplomat Pablo Neruda’s time as Ambassador to Sri Lanka in 1929.
However, many of these films attempt to erase any rape from the poet’s legacy, and what’s most admirable about Handagama’s retelling of the poet’s life spent on the island is that despite Sri Lanka being known for its conservative culture, the filmmaker does not shy away from depicting the nature of the poet’s infatuation and the act of sexual assault.
The script for the film was inspired by Neruda’s Memoirs, and in this memoir, the poet alludes to the “untouchable woman” and describes her as the “most beautiful Ceylonese woman”. However, the filmmaker draws attention to this observation: while Neruda makes plenty of references to his Burmese lover Josie Bliss in his poetry, no poem of Neruda’s alludes to this woman with whom he was so smitten. This observation is what inspired the tagline of Handagama’s film –“The poem Neruda never wrote”.
Despite all this history and “behind-the-scenes” of it all, we decided to go into the film completely blind, so as not to colour our opinion of the actual final product of all the conversation surrounding the poet in his real life. I didn’t even know that the dialogues would entirely be in English with Sinhala and Tamil subtitles.
Perhaps if you were a fan of Neruda’s work, then the constant reciting of his poetry by the characters may interest you. However, the clunky dialogue stuffed with long lines of poetry and awkward, rough performances really take away from an otherwise beautiful film. Thanks to Channa Deshapriya’s gorgeous cinematography, the film at least is stunning to look at, capturing Sri Lanka in a striking light. However, this isn’t enough to save it in the end. It is definitely not meant for a casual viewer.
“Alborada” is now screening in Scope Cinemas – at Colombo City Centre and Liberty Cinema.