***/****
starring Anant Nag, Mita Vasisht, Nitya Shetty, Nikhil Yadav
screenplay by Emmanuel Pappas and Digvijay Singh
directed by Digvijay Singh
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Maya is a surprisingly natural movie that could have easily degenerated into histrionics. Despite dealing with an outlawed but still-active Indian ceremony in which newly-pubescent girls are raped, it never resorts to sensationalistic horror. Instead, it sketches a portrait of a girl, her cousin, and a family that shows both the person about to be crushed and the mentality that allows it to happen. While it occasionally descends into obviousness and smoothes out some hard edges, it distinguishes itself from hand-wringing problem pictures by sketching the violation of a person instead of just a body.
Wisely, director Digvijay Singh starts with just enough horror to instill dread over the rest of the film. Beginning with a scream in the dark, and following it up with a boy’s frantic attempts to open the door that hides it, he gives you all you need to know: that someone is suffering and someone wants to stop it. This casts an uneasy pall over the proceedings as we flash-forward to before the hidden event: despite the rebellious nature of young cousins Maya and Sanjay, one knows that something is soon to overtake them. But as they trick street vendors out of their candy and play a little doctor, we can’t figure out just what. We learn so much about how defiant they are and the things they like to do that we don’t know what’s relevant to the narrative.
But the doom-y feeling lingers as Maya’s first menstruation is discovered, and Sanjay’s parents (with whom Maya lives) prepare her for an upcoming…something. Up to this point, the parents have been largely typical, if prone to a little slapping around, but they become less forgiving as the day of the mystery ceremony nears. Nobody will tell the friends exactly what is planned, and any sort of irreverent behaviour towards either one’s parents (or Maya’s slap-faced dolt of a younger brother) becomes an occasion for shouting or abuse. The mother and father have holy men to honour and neighbours to impress, so there had better be no argument and no loss of face. And so the film’s canny structural device leads us inexorably to the ceremony–it shows how a fiery and willful girl is slowly, then painfully, put in her place.
Admittedly, the details the structure contains are not always up to scratch. The direction, while capable, doesn’t bring the feeling of the scenes alive: often making claustrophobic use of the family house in ways that recall Raise the Red Lantern, it’s so subdued that it can’t visually evoke the protagonists’ defiance. And though the two leads are vividly characterized, the parents are more or less one-note, given a few too many “cut that out, you rebellious thing”-type lines and made rigid by a lack of supporting quirks that would place them in the same moral universe as their children.
Some of the street vendors and holy men are similarly broad to the point of rigidity: with the exception of a priest who explodes with profanity when he is challenged, one gets the feeling that the world outside of the protagonists is immovable and everyone plays their part without choice. A few superfluous eccentricities would have undercut their pretensions to understanding and truth and revealed the faces they wear to be the artificial and useless poses they are. But there are no alternatives available, sealing the film up in doom and calling it a day.
Singh and co-writer Emmanuel Pappas have gone a long way towards making us understand the cost of their subject without resorting to shock. The feeling that Maya emanates is one of profound loss–not the leering fascination of a horrible event, but a memory of a person shattered by a ceremony. If the film errs a little too much on the side of the non-visceral, it is compensating for all those other films that feel too much and explain too little, and gives us pause to consider instead of merely scrambling our senses.
