Victoria Review | Embodied Labour, Feminist Ethic: Reading Sivaranjini바카라�s Victoria

Sivaranjini바카라�s Victoria is a quiet, unsentimental portrayal of working-class womanhood in contemporary Kerala. Without any grand declarations or overtly dramatic gestures, the film maps the contours of exhaustion, survival, and resistance that shape the everyday lives of women like Victoria. What makes Victoria significant is its refusal to treat labour as merely economic. It shows us how labour, especially when performed by women, is always layered. It is physical, emotional and spiritual바카라�a workplace can sometimes become the only space where a woman feels, momentarily, in control. From its very first scene, in which a woman speaks of a snake she believes she saw, because she failed to offer a promised cock in a ritual, the film weaves together myth, faith, and survival with precision. The promised offering becomes not only a literal rooster, but a metaphor that runs throughout the film. The rooster is constantly present, uncaged and elusive, becoming a symbol for many things as well as the only male presence in the film바카라�a burden of guilt, a reminder of obligations unfulfilled. It is not a single metaphor but a shifting one, embodying different emotions and oppressions, depending on who is engaging with it.

The beauty parlour, where much of the film unfolds, is deceptively mundane. Yet it is here, in this feminised, semi-private space, that labour becomes layered with agency. Jeena Chechi바카라�s dance inside the parlour is a political moment masked as a private one. Her body바카라�otherwise in service to customers, to family, to norms바카라�finds a few seconds of uninhibited joy within a space she controls. There is no audience, no applause. But that moment of dancing for herself, not for anyone else, is an assertion of autonomy over her body, her space, and her time. These acts, though seemingly minor, are radical because they claim space for joy in a world that only expects service. Victoria herself navigates a more complex emotional terrain. Her work becomes a sanctuary, not because it is free of oppression, but because it is freer than her home. For a working-class woman like Victoria, personal spaces often collapse under the weight of caregiving, of emotionally unavailable or outright abusive relationships, and economic dependence. In contrast, despite the emotional and physical demands it places, the parlour offers brief moments of safety. It is in this space that she forms bonds, negotiates differences, and begins to understand her own boundaries. Her relationship with her job is not romanticised; it is exhausting. It becomes a site of refusal to be defined solely by her roles as a daughter, sister, or girlfriend.

The small negotiations between women are some of the film바카라�s most powerful moments. Victoria바카라�s gentle push to a customer to use henna instead of chemical dye might seem simple, but it reflects a deeper feminist ethic pervading the film바카라�that of negotiation without coercion. Here, feminism is not about grand speeches, but about everyday choices and mutual respect. The women do not force change upon each other; they suggest, offer and allow for it. This subtle ethic resists the more overtly liberal feminist frameworks that often disregard the quiet wisdom of survival. The film is replete with symbols that anchor the women바카라�s lived realities. The rooster, the line of customers waiting, all these are weighted with meaning. The rooster, in particular, becomes a haunting presence. When Victoria hallucinates herself catching it, it signals the mental and emotional collapse that the film has been building towards. The hallucination is not a failure. It is the logical endpoint of being endlessly responsible, for emotional care, for physical labour, and for spiritual maintenance. Her life is not extraordinary. And in this ordinariness lies the film바카라�s sharpest critique바카라�that working-class women are expected to manage a staggering array of responsibilities, without rest, without recognition, and often without even the language to articulate their exhaustion.

It is in conversation where casual, intimate, and often seemingly mundane things embody the film바카라�s quiet resistance. Characters like Deepa and Rosie exchange views on relationships, sharing small but significant observations. For instance, their conversation about a dominant caste Christian woman opens up a critique on caste within Kerala바카라�s Christian communities. The film reveals how Savarna Christians uphold caste hierarchies, while simultaneously distancing themselves from their own histories of conversion and caste mobility. In this context, gossip is not frivolous바카라�it is tactical. It allows women to name their oppressors without making themselves vulnerable to direct retaliation. These conversations are acts of resistance, of memory, and solidarity.

The mythic and the real are deeply entangled in Victoria. Stories of saints slaying snakes and the ritual of offering a sacrificial rooster are not presented as naive or escapist. They are survival strategies바카라�narratives passed down, retold, and reimagined in ways that help women make sense of their pain. But the film does not romanticise these beliefs either. It makes clear that these myths often ask women to place their faith in the distant. Faith becomes both a balm and a burden. It offers solace whilst perpetuating a cycle in which women are expected to endure.

Victoria바카라�s romantic relationship is perhaps the most painful thread in the film. Her partner바카라�s emotional detachment, his indifference, and subtle gaslighting are not portrayed as exceptional. They are depressingly normal, and this is the point. The emotional extraction women experience in intimate relationships is not merely about 바카라�bad men바카라�, but about a society absolving men from emotional labour whilst expecting women to perform it in excess. Victoria바카라�s demands are minimal: a little attention, empathy and basic respect. The fact that she cannot receive even these is not just a reflection of her boyfriend바카라�s flaws, it is a reflection of a system that teaches men entitlement and teaches women patience. Her eventual breakdown is not a narrative of failure but of structural collapse. There is no space바카라�literal or metaphorical바카라�where she can rest. There is no safety net, no reprieve to grieve or rage or simply be. Her hallucinations, her exhaustion, her quiet cries are not symptoms of individual weakness. They are political. They are the cost of surviving in a world that continuously extracts from women while offering nothing in return.

Victoria refuses the cinematic impulse to glorify women바카라�s resilience. There are no grand victories, and no redemptive arcs. Survival itself is messy, unspectacular, and often humiliating. But in showing this, Sivaranjini offers something profoundly political바카라�a refusal to romanticise the pain of working-class women. Instead, she reveals the quiet radicalism of women choosing themselves바카라�sometimes through pettiness, sometimes through selfishness, sometimes through withdrawal. These acts, too often dismissed or apathologized, are shown for what they are바카라�resistance.

By redefining the workspace not as a backdrop but as a central, contested site of survival, Victoria reimagines labour, care, and agency. It reminds us that for many working-class women, the workplace is not just a site of exploitation, it is also a place to form community, reclaim autonomy, and in the smallest of ways, resist.

Reeba Mariyam, a postgraduate in Film Studies from Birkbeck, University of London, is a visual artist and writer based between India and London, working across film, photography, and poetry.

Victoria is being screened at the Habitat Film Festival, New Delhi.