Siya movie review: It's brutal; at times, excessively so

There is just no comfort to be had in Manish Mundra’ s directorial debut, Siya, which releases a few years after the Delhi rape case, but not too many since Hathras. Siya is 17, and without access to the shelter of POCSO Act, unable even to get a FIR registered on her behalf. She is already a rape survivor some minutes in, only to be abducted, starved and gang raped for 11 days. The story weaves together a tapestry from infamous crimes against women in India.

With every plot uptick, first in the form of nationwide media attention, then a CBI enquiry, comes a greater fall. When Siya refuses to be guilted into marrying one of her rapists and pursues justice, her father is tied to a tree and publicly lynched to death. His family, thinking they are going to fetch him from the hospital, are taken to his cremation site. It’s less a warning, more of a threat. The family is also shot at when they attempt to spread the father’s ashes. Siya’s champions, lawyer brother-in-law (Vineet Kumar Singh), her mother, and aunt are killed in a fake car crash. In slow and chilling detail, Siya loses everything until she is all alone, in a coma at a hospital.

It’s brutal. At times, excessively so. In one scene, Siya looks longingly at a peer – a girl! – in uniform, as she drops off her little brother at school. She had hoped for an education and to earn a living. Instead, she runs on a hamster wheel, teaching her brother how to read in between a mountain of household chores. These put-upon wishes are brought back in a later scene, reinforcing the distance between her wish and reality. Can’t she have at least one thing in her favour? A parable in a bed time tale, the voice over doha – “Maati kahe kumhaar se, tu kya ronde mohe? Ek din aisa ayega, main rondungi tohe” (the soil tells the potter that he too will be soil and kneaded one day) –manipulate us like the non-diegetic crooning in a ’90s Bollywood movie.

All this suffering might have been senseless if Siya was not building on the long history of rape revenge fantasies in Bollywood. Think of Sunny Deol saving Damini with his macho dhai kilo ka haath, Amitabh Bachchan, half-senile, showing up for you at court in Pink. The rape of a woman becomes an inciting incident for the hero. The story largely explores the effect of such violence not on its victim but on the men close to her. Give me a better reason as to why plots like Sheesha, where a rape allegation is seen as an instrument to frame an innocent man, have reigned before Maatr, Mom and Bhoomi. Or why rape is a throw away line in the more contemporary Jab We Met, “Mai tumhara rape nahi karunga ( I will not commit rape on you),” while visualising the assailability of a woman, “a khuli tijori” (open locker). It’s the blatant punchline of a Chatur’s speech in 3 Idiots. Siya’s link to its forebears makes it an ambitious project.

If the post Me-Too Promising Young Woman gave us a revenge fantasy while favouring realism over catharsis, in Siya, there is only realism, with no catharsis in sight. Critics have mentioned that PYW protagonist Cassie’s success in framing her best friend Nina’s rapist is shadowed by Cassie’s being smothered to death, a second and final assault. That she is able to rely on the police to help is a privilege that reduces the stakes, rendering her end a kind of death wish. Siya is almost antonymic to Cassie. A minor from rural Devganj with a will to live right to the end. Siya makes the point that PYW fails to, about how systems meant to enact justice constantly fail women. It’s the last line she tells Mahender before the car crash, “Aisa nyay ka kya jab koi zinda hi na ho?” (what is the point of justice, when there’s no one alive to see it?) Like PYW, Siya must also be applauded for its casting. Relative newcomers ground the story better than if it had been Alia Bhatt in the place of Pooja Pandey or Pankaj Tripathi playing Vineet Kumar’s Mahender.

To further credit, Mundra, who has previously produced movies like Ankhon Dekhi, Masaan, Newton, Waiting, I got the sense that the film was responding to several discussions on depicting rape in the news. Questions of ethics: should the victim’s name be revealed, what sort of details are necessary; should reporters worry about sensationalism in trying to reach as large an audience as possible in order to manufacture sympathy for the survivor?

Siya gets the ethical pass that newswallahs do not. Such a story could not have been possible through any form other than fiction. Its emotional impact transforms a statistic into a living, breathing girl. The film lets us experience what we’ve often seen hashed out between talking heads but hardly been able to visualise. Investigations and trials are sites of retraumatizing, an insight lost in slogans like #BelieveAllWomen. An axis shift during one scene puts us resolutely in Siya’s shoes. As the camera swivels around her, during the crime recreation as part of the CBI investigation, the people behind her vanish to reveal her isolation. We see the toll that a good-cop-bad-cop routine may exact on a survivor. We are in the kitchen making rotis with Siya as she must overhear her uncle say she must correct the shame she has brought upon her family and marry her rapist. We wake up with her shivering in the night after hearing that every one of her assailants was let out on bail. This movie will wear you down but that is its only point, to really remember those who cannot when we get too busy living.

Eisha Nair is an independent writer-illustrator based in Mumbai. She has written on history, art, culture, education, and film for various publications. When not pursuing call to cultural critique, she is busy drawing comics.

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