Credit: MGM/Orion Pictures/Universal Pictures
2 min read
We don’t need to see the violence of Women Talking to understand its magnitude. The aftermath is more than enough.
Women Talking is the second most surprising thing to happen to the Oscar nominations this year (the first is, obviously, Andrea Riseborough). Indeed, so surprised was the film’s writer and director, Sarah Polley (Stories We Tell), with her nominations for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, that she was just hanging out at a routine doctor’s appointment when the news came through.
You’d be forgiven for assuming that this isn’t your kind of movie. After all, with its subject matter and title, Women Talking has been pegged by many as one of those awards season films. You know, the ones that can feel a bit like sipping on medicine, where actors act with a capital A, and, while the film is lauded, is somewhat unpleasant to consume (30 Rock fans may have immediately conjured Tracy Jordan’s faux Oscar turn in Hard To Watch).
Despite all of this, though, Sarah Polley’s film is not hard to watch. It’s magnetic.
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The film is based on the 2018 novel of the same name by Miriam Toews, which itself is a reaction to the very grim real-life events that occurred in a remote and isolated Mennonite community. There, between 2005 and 2009, over 100 girls and women woke up to discover they had been raped while sleeping. The attacks were initially dismissed as acts of “wild female imagination” or attributed to the devil as punishment for their sins, until it was eventually revealed that a group of men from their colony were using animal tranquillisers to assault them.
In the film, one of these same lines – originally used to discredit women – is used in the opening scenes: “What follows is an act of female imagination”.
Watch the trailer for Women Talking below:
Women Talking is set within an isolated religious colony where the women and girls have been subjected to drugging, sexual abuse, and beatings for years. As the movie opens, the women have reached their breaking point. While the men of the colony are away, bailing the attackers out of jail, they have given the women an ultimatum: forgive, or leave and accept eternal damnation.
But the women have come up with different options for themselves: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave and create a new colony.
Democratically, they select three families to decide their fate. Among them are Ona (Rooney Mara), an unmarried woman who has fallen pregnant as a result of the attacks, and her sister, Salome (Claire Foy). Mariche (Jessie Buckley), Agata (Judith Ivey), Greta (Sheila McCarthy), and – briefly – a very severe Frances McDormand (who’s also a producer on the film) make up the numbers. As the colony’s women aren’t taught to read or write, they also bring one man into their group to document their meeting: local schoolteacher August, perfectly portrayed by Ben Whishaw.
And that is how we come to find ourselves cloistered in a hayloft with a cast so great that it suddenly seems infuriating there isn’t a Best Ensemble award at any of the major shows.
A film like this has two difficult (and easily fallible) things to balance. The first: to manage being very frank and upfront about something very awful, as it can’t dilute its subject matter. Indeed, its subject matter is literally the impetus for these conversations the women are having. The second, of course, is to avoid feeling as if someone has turned a camera upon a play – because, much like a play, it’s a story that a) takes place in a single room, and b) unfolds entirely through conversation.
It succeeds, mostly, in not feeling too stagey, and that is because Polley is a great writer . Much as she did in the Oscar-nominated Away From Her and TV series Alias Grace, she makes language feel cinematic, keeping the dialogue pacey. The tension is ramped up, too, because there’s a strict time limit of 24 hours: after a day has passed, the colony’s abusive men will return, and the women must have made their potentially life-or-death decision by then. I was often on the edge of my seat – and the edge of tears – watching and wondering if someone in the group would change their mind and allow them all to move forward, or hold them back and sabotage their chances of escape.
If this sounds claustrophobic, there are moments of relief to be found – and far more laugh-out-loud moments than I expected. This is a film that knows its audience (much like its characters) need the pressure to be lifted sometimes. That they need to breathe. And that they need to, above all else, escape the confines of the barn.
Credit: Getty
Women Talking also manages to make something horrific and seemingly unique to this community resonate with viewers on a universal level. And that’s because the violence and patriarchal abuse that they are subjected to (despite being, in the context of the film, directly related to their religion) is sadly prevalent out here in the real world, too. It is what happens when hierarchical systems of power are allowed to develop and grow around a set of values or beliefs that are then used to justify seemingly unjustifiable behaviour.
This is something that Polley herself is all too familiar with. In her collection of essays, Run Towards The Danger, she writes about the trauma she suffered as a child actor on the set of Terry Gilliam’s Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
“I see it in the context of a cultural phenomenon of what many white men have been allowed to get away with in the name of art,” she writes. “It’s hard to calculate whether they were worth the price of the hell that so many went through over the years to help him make them”.
In a second essay, titled The Woman Who Stayed Silent, Polley details an assault that took place when she was just 16 – at the hands of an older man in a position of professional power. In both cases, she writes how it took years to register what had happened to her as assault and abuse, conveying that you can be conditioned to try and normalise a terrible situation, if only as a means of self-preservation.
Much like Run Towards The Danger, Women Talking is a confrontation of the many ways women can react to and process trauma. That, I think, is why this adaptation feels so safe in Polley’s capable hands. She knows that sometimes, even in a film with the word ‘talking’ in the title, there are no words. And, in dealing with this very heavy subject matter, she knows we don’t need to see the violence to understand its magnitude. The aftermath is more than enough.
Women Talking is a phenomenal film with heart-breaking performances. Maybe it would take “an act of female imagination” to see it win Best Picture this year, but at the very least, I hope that its nomination will enable a wider audience to see it and allow its brilliant director to keep telling stories.
Images: MGM/Orion Pictures/Universal Pictures
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