Scent of the Lotus Pond

Maitipe has chosen to take the path of a popular cinema form – melodrama – to deal with complex modern issues of sexuality and desire. It is imaginable that a film-maker like Douglas Sirk, master of the use of melodrama for the presentation of critical ideas could be a model for such a début. Maitipe deals with love affairs, obsession with sex and the frustration of not being loved, in an open and sometimes quite unusual and startlingly direct way for South Asian cinema.A plot of intriguing twists and surprises – and constructed in three episodes representing three different periods in her life – follows the life of Gothami, a poor, insecure, frustrated and sometimes vicious young woman who works in a local garment factory. She shares a house with her best friends: the beautiful and pampered Mangala and the modest Swineetha. They are to play a crucial part in the twists and turns of her future – and her obsessive loves and jealousy. She falls for the glamorous soldier Vipula, who is actually in love with Mangala and seduces him with tragic consequences. Sexuality for Maitipe is a metaphor or crucial element in building ‘the moral dilemma’. Maitipe: ‘It is the poison my protagonists drink. The sex they have is what interlocks their fates and changes their destinies.’Scent of the Lotus Pond takes its melodramatic elements and creates a film that raises questions about moral attitudes in today’s Sri Lanka, but also uses the form to touch on other important social questions: adoption, the presence of the army and more. [S.F.]