Two nights, one day and a dawn. In seaside village in Java. Siti is a young woman who is the sole breadwinner for her family. Her husband is an invalid following an accident at sea; he lies on the marital bed, in silence, immobile. Siti has to pay back the money lent to them to buy the boat that was lost in the accident, and she does so by working day and night. By day, she sells rice fritters on the beach; by night, she is an entertainer in a karaoke bar. In a brief space of time, we see banal everyday occasions descend into events that involve her young son Bagas as well as a vigorous policeman, Gatot, who courts Siti, asking her to leave her husband. Siti’s tragic dawn leads her to the shore of that sea “which gave us life and which takes life away”.
Clearly inspired by neo-realist traditions, the Javanese director Eddie Cahyono paints, in an almost sculptural black and white, the travails of a woman whose sacrifices seem almost in vain, fruitless. Her husband stopped talking when Siti began working at night in the karaoke bar; her son Bagas is a wild child who doesn’t want to go to school and doesn’t seem to understand the difficult situation his mother is in. Siti finds some sympathy and comprehension in her mother-in-law – even though she suggests Siti changes job, perhaps trying to become a waitress abroad – and in her colleagues at the karaoke bar. Her relationship with the handsome policeman Gatot doesn’t seem to offer any consolation: it is clear that Siti doesn’t want to give in to his advances; on the contrary, in order to summon up the courage to go with him, she turns to alcohol and drugs for help…
Eddie Cahyono’s film presents the harsh reality of poverty and misery, where the dignity of the protagonist, does not allow her to give up. It is obvious that Siti still cares deeply for the man who refuses to talk to her. The trigger of the (possible) tragic ending are the words that the husband says, inviting her to leave him. But the truth is that Siti doesn’t actually want to. Hers is a tragic, all-consuming love, worthy of legendary heroines or from classic poetry (let us not forget that her name is the same as the classic heroine from Ramayana, the epic Indian poem, a fundamental part of pre-Islamic Indonesian culture).
The director uses “real time” for the majority of his sequences, with long and articulated shots that highlight the extraordinarily natural performances of the actors. In the role of Siti, Sekar Sari portrays an exemplary mother courage, mournful and respectful, her suffering contained. The potential raising of the melodrama stakes is thereby kept in check, the overall picture a run-of-the-mill tale of female heroism.
Despite this, Eddie Cahyono allows himself a few dreamlike and surreal representations, through the disturbing images of the black sea with its oppressive, menacing waves; an aesthetic portrayal in deliberate contrast with the promise “there is no sadness in the sea, only happiness”, to which Siti seems to succumb in the finale.