Shaun Seneviratne’s feature, Ben and Suzanne, A Reunion in 4 Parts, revolves around a long-distance couple who realize they are on different wavelengths when they get an opportunity at proximity. Time has taken its toll, and the gulf widens while the couple tries to mask that they have begun to wear each other out. But to what extent can they hold the pretense that everything is perfect and salvageable between them? Both have strayed impossibly far from each other in their attitudes and expectations; the disparity assumes a force that grows to tear them apart.
Ben (Sathya Sridharan) arrives in Sri Lanka to meet up with his girlfriend, Suzanne (Anastasia Olowin), an American residing in the country for work, and have a holiday together. He is zippy with excitement, which Suzanne tries to echo, but we quickly sense a tentative, hesitant edge in her when she’s around him. She is a NGO worker who, as she explains later when prodded by Ben, looks after micro loans dispensed by small women-led enterprises.
She joined the work believing in a noble vision, but now she is tasked with the unpleasant clean-up job of settling debts from those who’d put trust in her and invested. Therefore, she is stressfully swarmed with work demands while Ben tails her with a constant, guilt-inducing reminder that they were supposed to have a vacation. As he asserts what he imagines as the priorities in the relationship, she seems to recede, indicating a wariness about those assumptions he’s taking for granted.
Although there’s a veneer of intimacy, we discover the couple isn’t exactly on the same page. The stuff he is confident she knows is promptly flagged by Suzanne as things she’s wholly unfamiliar with. It becomes resoundingly clear that the relationship is going to be seriously tested and pulled at the seams. While he looks determined to weather what he gauges from her as a lack of interest, she comes across as someone who has simply risen above the relationship. She is looking for something else and he no longer fits in amidst her stack of inclinations. That she apparently puts in no effort to find some time for them to hang out irks Ben. This leads to the distancing, with every gesture of his hitting a sort of dead end. It does take a while for him to wake up to reality, confront and admit it aloud.
There are too many clashes of opinions between the two in how they perceive the relationship and where it’s headed. They acquire an insuperable potency that overrides any desire on the individuals’ part to make amends. It isn’t that they make fresh attempts at renewing an intimacy and soulful connection, which they both have lost, but the crossing is too narrow for them to make it to the other side with their dignity and emotional stakes intact. Suzanne is wound up about work whereas he is desperate to get all loose and reckless. The collision is inevitable and an outburst perched on the anvil. How long they can defer it emerges as the tipping point of the crisis, but the film fumbles in developing their particular identities, especially in relation to kinship and desolation in foreign lands and spaces that should ideally hurl out an embrace.
Ben laments his feeling of being out of place in India and America. He imagined he’d blend in Sri Lanka, but even that isn’t panning out much in his favor. No matter how familiar Suzanne is with Sri Lanka, she’ll only be looked at as a white woman. Thus, both have their identities and differences in them sharply accentuated wherever they land. Irrespective of their best efforts, they will eventually stick out. The film lingers with this fleetingly but in a pronounced manner. One wishes this seeped into the entire film, touching the edges of their journey through this unfamiliar land and conversations with its people. The disjointedness is deliberate and tied to a chapter breakdown; the headings are distracting in the sense they feel curated, but the film is saved by Sridharan’s performance. His character is amiable but flustered by his circumstances; Sridharan brings a lively, palpable authenticity.
Seneviratne’s film has pockets of warmth and bristling human emotion. It excellently evokes desperation, confusion, and oscillating uncertainties, but the film can’t quite transcend its bittiness or escape a certain exotic gaze with which the country is framed.
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