The Revenge Story Served Scorching Hot: Saýara

Since its emergence in the early 70s, the rape-revenge trope has become a staple of horror fiction equally hailed as loathed. A painfully necessary and yet controversial evil to tap the full cathartic potential of the genre, it usually relies on exploitation, provocation, transgression, shock-value and preferably lots of gore, over the top and graphic sexual violence, and bad taste in order to point at a specific social ill. Critics rail at a certain kind of voyeurism as well as instrumentalizing, making light of, and even glorifying of sexual violence against women while others, such as Australian scholar Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, call for film-specific interpretations.

Although meant as a negative opinion on the subgenre, instrumentalizing or exploiting a subject in art, no matter how hideous, traumatic, and real it is for its survivors in real life, are valid and effective ways of handling that subject and should be seen in an objective light. All the more in the case of the latest revenge film I saw during this year's Fantasy Filmfest, Can Evrenol's Saýara, which brings a fresh approach to the table.

A Turkmen immigrant living in Istanbul, Saýara works as a cleaner in a big gym but her real passion belongs to martial arts, a relic from her father who used to be a renowned fighter back in Turkmenistan. She's content as long as she's allowed to use her workplace for practicing her routine in the mornings, but has potential for greatness - something her boss, the hunky trainer Barış, is aware of. He's also very aware of her older sister Yonca with whom he has a rough affair, and he presumably has many more affairs going on, not to mention a wife who just gave birth to their baby. Sick of Yonca's possessiveness, he calls her to a flat where his group of male friends await to "teach her a lesson" but things get intense and at the end of a hellish night, she is killed and her death is disguised as suicide. These guys don't know what kind of hell they have unleashed.

First off - Saýara is ridiculously violent and gory. It is important to keep this in mind, as well as the instrumentalization and exploitation aspects I mentioned above in order to recognize their usage to make us understand what the film wants to say. Despite the rape scenes being off-screen, still, plenty of techniques have been used to give verisimilitude to the scenes in question to enhance the horrow and heartbreak. During the on-stage Q&A after the premiere at the FFF, Evrenol explained that he worked with prosthetic body parts as well as sound elements to convey the horror which none of us want to see, so that you have a scene where a foot hits a head and you hear crunchy noises and bumps, your brain assembles these impressions into what is implied, namely that Yonca's head is being kicked in.

Can also highlighted his personal interest in martial arts which is mirrored in Saýara. Especially jiu jitsu with a focus on grappling was highlighted in order to explain a young girl being able to fight older and stronger men and to give this aspect credibility. In this context, the lead character's Turkmen background also comes into play, as the movie often refers to flashbacks of Saýara's father (played by Zakirjan Bazarov) being a former fighter for the Russian government, and unbeknownst to me, there's apparently a net of organized islamic fighter groups active in Central Asian former Soviet States which are thus incorporated into this fight movie/slasher.

Saýara does not only touch on Russian structures though, there are neat little details which give plenty of hints about the Turkish society, politics and patriarchy. To further elaborate these, I will mention a few key moments in the order they appear in the movie which reflect the gender-related and political dynamics in Türkiye nicely.

 

Let's start with the rape scene. Yonca endures the sexual assault and even gives her consent to it if it is what Barış wants, but since she is being forced into this situation and it is not of her own volition, we will of course call this rape, and she is justly angry about it. The rape is a move to break her, to put her into her place, to teach her not to ask more than what she is given by men. The situation starts getting out of control when she starts expressing her rage by insulting one of her attackers' family and ancestors. Even though he is in a powerful position to hurt the woman physically, his masculinity is so fragile that he feels threatened by mere words spoken in anger, by provocation which unfortunately trigger the violence to end Yonca's life. Very typical, unfortunately.

When later all of the men involved in the killing of Yonca meet at Barış' house, they are confronted by his politically powerful father, a senator who scolds them and points out the background of each and every one of them to emphasize that they are highbrow, rich and should have known better. But alas, birds of a feather will flock together, as we know. A friend who happens to be a public prosecutor is on his way anyway. The frequency of corruption, of the wealthy getting away with about everything in Türkiye is the essence of the success revenge movies featuring "the underdog against the highbrow" achieve in this country (and I guess in many other countries too). There is a sense of helplessness in real life that wants to be alleviated, to be compensated in fiction and fantasies and revenge is the only way there. Only, Saýara is not a normal revenger, is she?

Saýara's fury at the news that her sister has been killed goes above and beyond what any revenge story can offer. It's rage, it's craze, it's a pain so big she won't stop until all the world feels it like she feels it, and I would argue that more than the rape-revenge theme, more than the gore, it is this extremization, this radicalization of anger, the snowballing of feelings into a kind of destruction that promises neither satisfaction nor contentment, is what constitutes the core of the horror in this story. Saýara is doomed because of her past, her origin and she will bring doom into the future. This is not a revenge story, this is calamity.

It is this derailment of inner darkness that allows the director to break out of formulaic expectations an audience might have. Evrenol was told that evening that his main character loses sympathy by killing innocent people, to which he answered she's not looking for sympathy. This is a story that starts dark to begin with and goes even darker and deeper.

And speaking of audience reactions, there's more to come, lol. As I mentioned before, I have had the chance to chat with Can Evrenol, but not on the evening of the premiere when everyone wanted a piece of him, but a day later, following the showing of the French film Else, which he watched in the regular audience. As we were speaking in the lobby, a woman came right at him and asked him why he hates women and accused him of being a misogynist to depict women in such skimpy clothes like whores and make them being raped... First, the costumes were designed by a woman, Evrenol's wife Elif Domaniç, so it is in fact she who must hate women, but whatever. Even if we ignore this fact, she was arguing from such a moralistic vantage point that it made my head ache. I was also fascinated by how differently people can perceive the same things they see. Sure, you can and succeed in showing how patriarchy sucks without showing what patriarchy and its consequences are. Some people may feel offended by seeing these. But you also can? Art is playful, free like that.

Finally, it was a pleasure to get to know Can who in my opinion is a trailblazer for the country we are both from, he provokes with his pictures and ideas and we need that. If it's not revealing too much - he mentioned he has two different projects on his mind right now and I can't wait to see more of his work.