'Women Talking' (2022), Director: Sarah Polley
Sarah Polley is an exceptional filmmaker. Her most recent film is the antithesis of Oscar-bait, its defiant title omitting the word sardonically voiced in the novel on which it's based: 'only women talking'.
Stories We Tell (which I reviewed here on its release in 2012) was Polley's gloriously sly first full-length documentary. Winner of Canada's Best Film Award, it was a homage to her mother, Diane Polley, an actor and casting director, who died of cancer at the age of 53, when Sarah was 11. Part of a revolution in nonfiction film, it challenged the idea of documentaries as journalistic reports, combining fictional and nonfictional modes of storytelling to reveal to the audience how her film was a work of artful construction. It begins with words from Margaret Atwood's novel,
Amazing Grace, in voiceover: 'When you're in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all but only a confusion. It's only afterwards it becomes a story, when you're telling it to yourself or someone else'.
Her latest film (her second fiction film) is another radical work in both subject matter and execution, adapted from Miriam Toews's 2018 novel of the same name. Polley directed her first fiction film in 2006, an adaptation of Alice Munro's story,
Away from Her, starring Julie Christie as a woman with Alzheimer's.
Women Talking is loosely based on real events that took place in a rural ultraconservative Mennonite colony in Bolivia in the mid-late 2000s, where around 100 girls and women were repeatedly drugged and raped in their sleep, purportedly by demons, but actually by local men. Toews's chilling fictional account begins after the attackers' arrest: With the colony's remaining men in town arranging bail for the accused men, eight women, representing all of the village's women, gather in a hayloft to decide what to do next.
Polley's film allows the full horror of the situation to emerge only gradually. It is through dialogue that we come to understand what has happened in this community. The women's story emerges out of their discussion about what should be done about their violations. They have asked the village school teacher August (Ben Whishaw) to take the minutes because as women they cannot write (or read). They list three choices: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. The first option is quickly dismissed. The ensuing conversations and arguments are driven by the struggle between the second and third options. We, the audience, are invited to eavesdrop on an ensemble cast of gifted actors engaging in what is, in all essentials, a Socratic dialogue. Boring as a basis for an exciting film? In Polley's hands, it is riveting.
Frances McDormand, who has a small role in
Women Talking and is one of its producers, explains why 'as a 65-year-old woman' she proposed a film based on Toews's book: 'All the things I thought were possible seemed to be shifting… literally in reversal from when I was an idealistic, broad-eyed, bushy-tailed feminist at 17'.
As a feminist, in her 20s, she will undoubtedly have seen a film with which Polley's has been compared: Marlene Gorris's 1982 psycho-drama,
A Question of Silence. In Goriss's film, three women, who have never met before, brutally kill the male owner of a clothes shop, watched by a group of silent women customers. The criminal psychiatrist appointed to determine the three women's sanity concludes that they are sane but simply sick of the strain of living under patriarchy. When the prosecutor suggests that the crime would have happened even if the owner had been a woman, the accused and witnesses laugh and exit the courtroom.
Four decades on from Gorris's film, McDormand explains, '[Toews] framed the conversation about the future, not about the past or about the murky present, but a bright future where the rules can change'. As the production took shape, with Polley writing the script,
Women Talking became an opportunity to challenge and re-make the largely male-written rules of the film industry itself. Polley, who had three children in the decade since making her last film, wanted to foster a working environment which had reasonable hours and open dialogue built in. As McDormand says, quoting producer Dede Gardner: 'You just bake it into the budget… You bake shorter days… the idea that the entire crew should not be sacrificing their personal lives for the making of the film. It's not cancer research'.
During the making of the film, the troupe shared stories with one another. Some of their real-life experiences filtered into the film. Polley had her own experience of sexual abuse to draw on. In her book of essays:
Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory (2022), she discloses that when she was 16, she was sexually abused by CBBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi, who was acquitted of five charges of sexual assault in 2016. In her essay, Polley describes her feelings of guilt at not coming forward during his trial to tell of her experience at his hands, which included throttling. Her account of her silence at the time, written from the point of view of her grown-up self, is harrowing and unsettling.
A title card at the beginning of
Women Talking describes it as 'an act of female imagination'. The phrase is double-edged. Told by elders that the sexual abuse they have suffered for years is the work of devils, ghosts or a too vivid female imagination, when the rapists are caught and sent away to a nearby town 'for their own safety' to await bail, the women have a brief moment before the return of their abusers, to 'imagine' their future. Should they stay and fight in a community that harbours rapists and abusers, and if so, what are they fighting for? – or should they leave and risk abandonment by the God they still worship?
The ensemble cast – including Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley and Frances McDormand – is staggeringly good, and the subject matter incendiary. Yet Polley's film is anything but a tale of violence and revenge. It is much more a meditation on survival and how to make a better world.
Women Talking is told like a timeless fable, though it is based on real events and is set in 2010. But the women in their homestead dresses and plaited hair are lost in the past, a sensibility captured perfectly by costume designer Quita Alfred, who worked with Polley when the director was a child actor in the early 1990s on the Canadian TV series
Road to Avonlea.
The Bic ballpoint pen that August uses to write the minutes is one of the few reminders of the contemporary setting; another is when a census taker drives through the area in a shambolic car, loudspeaker blaring out the Monkees' song,
Daydream Believer, rallying people to register to vote in the 2010 election.
The women's bodies show their trauma in different ways: bruised thighs, lost teeth, panic attacks. Ona (Mara) is pregnant by the man who raped her. Salome (a constantly seething-with-rage Foy) must walk a day-and-a-half to get her four-year-old daughter antibiotics. She'd rather 'stand my ground and shoot each man in the heart', swearing to 'burn forever in hell before I allow another man to satisfy his violent urges with the body of my four-year-old child'. Mariche (Buckley) doesn't want to make a fuss. Facing the prospect that 'we will be forced to leave the colony if we don't forgive the men', she demands, 'How will we be forgiven, if not by the elders whom we have disobeyed?' An older woman, Judith Ivey's Agata, counters: 'Perhaps forgiveness can, in some instances, be confused with permission'.
The reason that Mariche is the most adversarial (and angry) of the woman emerges only gradually and is hinted at in Agata's remark. The domestic violence she has suffered for years at the hands of her husband required a complicit community and, perhaps, repeated forgiveness. Most chilling, perhaps, are the words spoken by Mejal (Michelle McLeod) who suffers from panic attacks and fainting fits: 'They made us disbelieve ourselves'.
A sense of emancipatory urgency permeates Polley's film ('That day we learned to vote,' recalls the narrator, daughter of one of the women). The drama is driven by the central philosophical argument at its heart, as each of the women is given space to share hopes and fears, and ask big questions that have no easy answers. Some of the most moving moments are when the older women take the floor to speak, as when Agata, Salome's mother, gives voice to what is essentially a sermon on the kind of world she hopes for her children and children's children. Flashbacks illuminate the discussion but the atrocities are kept off-screen. The images that stick in the mind are mainly hopeful ones – children playing in fields, a wonderful collage of the boys' individual faces, a road winding ahead towards a distant horizon, a van zig-zagging along, blaring out a song.
Icelandic-born, Berlin-based Academy Award winner, Hildur Guðnadóttir's spare, folksy, guitar-dominant score enhances the unfolding tale, lending a melancholic, yearning tone to proceedings, as the women and girls find their voices for the first time. Her musical themes for the flashbacks of the abuse are doom-laden yet full of grace, resonating with Polley's dialogue which manages to bring the lightest and darkest together in the same moments. It sometimes feels as if the music is leading the film, urging it (and the women) forward. The relationship of Guðnadóttir's music to Polley's direction is exhilarating, whilst Luc Montpellier's bleached-out cinematography evokes a place where all of life's joys have been leached away by brutality.
It
is unbelievably grim, but Polley's film is also warm, its glints of humour and tenderness shining through. The women disagree – vehemently sometimes – but they also laugh and sing together, and always end up comforting one another. Their journey to their decision is gripping and thrilling. We care what happens to each and every one of them. The acting is superb, each actor intent on showing that every woman's reaction to abuse is different. The film eschews sentimentality and avoids melodrama to such an extent that even Ben Whishaw's once-too-often tear-streaked face was not enough to blot this pitch-perfect film.
The final shot focuses on Ona's wriggling newborn daughter, the main reason to walk forward into the unknown. And those who stay for the end credits, knowing that the women face an uncertain future, will leave the theatre with
Daydream Believer once again ringing in their ears. At the very very end of the end credits, I swear, I heard it again, but this time sung by children.
For these women, the unknown is freedom, made possible by daring to dream together.
Jean Barr is Emeritus Professor of Adult and Continuing Education at the University of Glasgow
