Sarah Polley (2022)
Women Talking is Sarah Polley’s fourth feature as director and the first for ten years. I’ve admired all three of its predecessors: Polley got a wonderful performance from Julie Christie in Away From Her (2006), crafted an unusual, complex drama in Take This Waltz (2011) and made a highly original documentary in Stories We Tell (2012). Women Talking is more successful on its own terms than most other films I’ve so far seen at this year’s London Film Festival. Thanks to its subject matter, it will probably give its writer-director a higher profile than ever before. I found it monotonously disappointing. Adapted from a novel of the same name by Miriam Toews, Women Talking is peopled by members of a religious sect and you come out of the film feeling you’ve been in church – for a service that’s nothing but sermon.
Somewhere in rural America, the women of a Mennonite community have recently discovered that repeated sexual assaults on them during the preceding two years were not, as their menfolk told them, the devilish work of an incubus or a figment of ‘wild female imagination’ but were carried out by male members of their colony, who used animal drugs to anaesthetise the women before raping them. The perpetrators, one of whom was eventually caught in the act, are now in police custody. Other men from the community have travelled to the city where their fellows are being held to arrange bail for them. While they’re away, eight women convene for urgent consideration of their options. Should they do nothing? Should they stay put and try to reform the colony? Should they make good their escape before the men return? The do-nothing option is almost immediately rejected. The women argue among themselves, and the pros and cons of remaining or leaving. Their processional exodus is the conclusion to Polley’s film.
Most of Women Talking takes place in one location, a hayloft where the women debate and that functions essentially as a theatre set. This doesn’t of itself condemn the piece to talky stasis but Polley’s camerawork – a succession of uninteresting close-ups and reaction shots – does. I’ve seen the film described as a distaff version of 12 Angry Men (1957), which suggests that one of the women is set to convert all the others to her way of thinking (as the Henry Fonda character persuaded his eleven fellow jurors to switch to a not guilty verdict). While it’s true that the two characters with the most lines in Women Talking – Mariche (Jessie Buckley) and Salome (Claire Foy) – take different positions, opinions within the group are, from the start, much more evenly divided in Polley’s barn than they were in Sidney Lumet’s jury room. This limits Women Talking as a dramatic entertainment but entertainment isn’t what the film-maker is after. The DP, Luc Montpellier, has desaturated the images to near-monochrome. The austere look that results makes clear that Polley means serious, morally educative business.
In a foreword to her novel, Miriam Toews describes it as ‘a reaction through fiction’ to real-life events. According to Wikipedia, ‘In 2011, seven men from the Manitoba Colony, an ultraconservative Mennonite community in Bolivia, were put on trial after being accused of raping 130 women in their homes between 2005 and 2009 after drugging them with animal anaesthetic’. It’s hardly surprising that this piqued the interest of Toews, herself the daughter of Mennonite parents and a native of Manitoba, Canada. Women Talking was first published in 2018, soon after the #MeToo movement had begun to develop its powerful cultural traction, but Toews must have been writing the novel well before then. Polley’s adaptation is, inevitably, a different matter. By now, it’s hard to see its characters’ circumstances and war of words as anything other than an analogue of the sexual harassment and abuse debates of recent years. The destination of the film’s title characters, when they exit the patriarchal community, isn’t a specific place but a better tomorrow for women.
Sarah Polley is no doubt deeply invested in Women Talking‘s sexual abuse theme and for partly personal reasons. In October 2017, she wrote a piece for The New York Times about her own experience of Harvey Weinstein and gendered power relations in Hollywood more generally (‘The Men You Meet Making Movies’). Earlier this year, she published Run Towards the Danger, a collection of autobiographical essays in one which she claimed to have been sexually assaulted by the Canadian television personality and writer Jian Ghomeshi on a date, when she was sixteen and he twenty-eight. On the evidence of the film she’s made, Polley is relatively less interested in the fact that the rape victims in her film are Mennonites – even though their beliefs are crucial to their identity and, the women think, to the dilemma they face. Polley, well aware that few of her audience will find it easy to engage with her characters’ extreme piety, ensures that their religion matters much less than their gender.
Although the film does what it says on the tin, it’s even more a matter of Actors Acting: the struggle for the upper hand in argument is a contest in theatrical vocal effort. Women Talking features forceful performances rather than strongly realised or developed characters – the lines are parcelled out to the dialectic’s eight participants and three generations. Each of the matriarchs Greta (Sheila McCarthy) and Agata (Judith Ivey) has two daughters; Greta’s are Mariche and Mejal (Michelle McLeod); Agata’s are Salome and her older sister Ona (Rooney Mara), who is unmarried but pregnant as a result of rape. Although Mariche and Salome are often antagonists, there’s a strong bond between their daughters, Autje (Kate Hallett) and Neitje (Liv McNeil) – it was the latter that witnessed a rape and blew the lid off the systemic sexual outrages occurring. A third older woman, Scarface Janz, represents the small minority that prefers to carry on as if nothing had happened. She therefore soon exits the hayloft. But since Scarface Janz is played by Frances McDormand (also one of the film’s producers), she’s the strongest presence in the piece.
Two other individuals of note reinforce the sense that Polley has shaped Women Talking to meet the expectations of a supposedly progressive audience. Miriam Toews cleverly contrives to have her novel narrated by a male voice that gives expression to women’s voices that wouldn’t otherwise be heard. August Epps, a young man raised in the colony but educated outside it (and, for a time, excommunicated), has recently returned to teach the boys of the community. House rules forbid female literacy; the eight women therefore ask August to take minutes of their debate; the novel comprises what he writes down. Polley retains August (Ben Whishaw) but translating the material to the screen inevitably diminishes his importance: the highly articulate disputants don’t need him to convey their arguments. Although he carries a torch for Ona, August comes across almost as an honorary female in the company, even though few of the actual women share his meek, transparently sensitive manner. Nettie/Melvin (August Winter) is a much smaller role. I don’t know whether s/he features in Toews’s novel or is Polley’s invention (Nettie/Melvin doesn’t appear on Wikipedia’s list of the book’s characters). Late in the film, this mostly silent character says to another, who has acknowledged their male name, ‘Thank you for calling me Melvin’.
I couldn’t begin to imagine what a religious community of the kind depicted in Women Talking would really make of someone whose sex assignment at birth was female but who identified as male. I’m not sure that Sarah Polley can imagine this either but the ‘acceptance’ of Nettie/Melvin as non-binary presses the right political button, as does the fact that they’re played by a non-binary actor (I’m using the word, as above, in its non-gendered sense). I do hope that casting a publicly gay actor as August isn’t, similarly, Polley’s way of making the film’s only cis male more palatable to the audience. As might be expected, Ben Whishaw does some fine things but he’s unusually self-conscious in this role – and Polley comes close to spoiling one of his best bits. It’s hard to tell from the characters’ idiosyncratic clothes and manner of speaking the time in which the story takes place but both suggest quite a distant past. One of the most powerful moments in Women Talking comes when the camera moves outside the hayloft to show a vehicle on the outskirts of the colony. The vehicle’s loudspeaker exhorts people in the area to engage with the 2010 US national census: it’s startling suddenly to realise you’re observing lives in nearly present-day America. The loudspeaker then plays the Monkees’ ‘Daydream Believer’. Watching life outside from the inside, August quietly and wistfully sings along. Ben Whishaw sings to touching effect but, as the music fades into the distance, Polley has him stop singing with corny abruptness.
The women decide to leave at daybreak. On the evening before, Mariche’s abusive husband Klaas returns to the colony. I wasn’t clear why he was, it seems, the only man to do so, except in order for Mariche to have a black eye the following morning (when Klaas, who remains unseen, is said to be still in a drunken stupor so unable to interfere with the women’s departure). I wasn’t clear either what lay in store for August. He’s increasingly weepy in the closing stages – how much this had to do with male guilt or saying goodbye to Ona or worrying about the reaction of the other men when they returned, I wasn’t sure. To be honest, I wasn’t interested either. It’s a mark of the effect this film had that, by the end of Women Talking, even Ben Whishaw was starting to get on my nerves.
13 October 2022
