Women Talking

Only Women Bleed

or

...Then What's a Heaven For?
 

"The Following is a Product of Female Imagination" says the title once the opening narration of Women Talking is finished—opening line: "This all happened before you were born"—and it's a bitterly defiant statement as we've just learned that the women of a Mennonite colony--who are being systematically drugged with cattle tranquilizers, raped, beaten and often impregnated--have been chastised by the men of the colony that their accusations are hysterical, or that they're being visited by ghosts or demons or that it is all a product of "wild female imagination," and holds no truth in reality. Their reality.

 

"Wild female imagination." "Female Imagination" does not bruise and it cannot make pregnant. Men do that in their male imaginations and plots. Because they can. Because they think they can get away with it. Because they can't do it any other way. Because they're allowed to get away with it. Because their authority can't be questioned.

 

And because accusing the men of it (they say, because it's "their colony") will mean that the women won't be able to go to Heaven for their "lies." The men, presumably will, because there's nothing in The Ten Commandments about hypocrisy.

The men have now gone into the neighboring town to try and make bail for the accused attackers. They will be gone for more than a day, and, when they return, the women are expected to apologize...and if they don't recant, they will face excommunication and, of course, not be able to reach the Kingdom of Heaven.

So, while the men are gone, the women take a vote—their first—and because they are prohibited from learning to read or write, It's done with pictographs and X's. 

There are three choices. Stay and Submit. Stay and Fight. Flee. Leave the colony.

The vote is split between "Stay and Fight" and "Leave the colony" and so, the women choose representatives to discuss what will be done, the ramifications, the logistics, what will come next. And to keep a record of their discussion, they recruit the one male left behind, August (Ben Whishaw)—whose family was excommunicated due to his mother's objections to the men's dictates—to record the minutes of their meeting, a record to be left behind.

Three generations of women discuss what comes next: elders Agata (Judith Ivey), Janz (Frances McDormand), and Greta (Sheila McCarthy), daughters Ona (Rooney Mara), pregnant with the child of her attacker, Mariche (Jessie Buckley) and her children, and Salome (Claire Foy) all gather in a barn-loft to discuss their options and make the decisions before the men-folk come back. They know the situation is intolerable—although Jenz decides that she will stay and leaves the discussions early—and they have to decide what sort of life they want for themselves. And for their children, who are also subject to the men's attacks—the most recent attack was on Salome's four year old daughter.

It's a particularly appropriate time to have movies like this, as women's autonomy is under attack in this country and throughout the world (it's why the recent adaptation of "The Handmaid's Tale" recently resonated so much in the collective zeitgeist—while the 1990 film of it couldn't make its costs back—and as the #MeToo movement exposed the pervasive inequities in the power structures as women cemented their places in the workplace and in government). The only way to fight the entrenched power structure is in an organized group-dynamic that can up-end the status quo and maybe drown it out.

Women organizing and re-asserting power is as old as "Lysistrata," but writer-director Sarah Polley (Away From Her and Stories We Tell), has other things to discuss in Women Talking besides Fight or Flight. Good Lord, one of these days the Library is going to have a "Revenge" genre in their DVD selections, and that easy solution is dissected and vivisected in the course of the movie, because some of the women just want revenge. This multi-generational congress weighs options based on need, principals, philosophies, and viable futures...which includes going to heaven. In a way, it is it's own version of Twelve Angry Men—call it Eleven Angry Women—where prejudices are revealed, motivations are explained, and minds are changed. And it's performed by some of the best and subtle actors in the field.

If there's a complaint, it's that the introduction is a little rushed, some of the circumstances of the women involved not made clear from the outset, leaving an audience-member confused rather than intrigued. And Polley desaturates her images so far into the gray scale that it could almost be black-and-white. As some directors (Welles and Bogdanovich and Ford) have pointed out, sometimes color can be just too pretty for what you're trying to convey and the film-matter, though set on acres of fields is far from verdant. The film is a tough-sell, anyway, perhaps the distributors insisted on a color film, and this was Polley's solution.

And for anyone who grouses that the film is any sort of "stretch" it's based on a book that took as its inspiration, what was called "The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia," where, beginning in 2005, women in a colony began to be subjected to this type of outrage and decided to leave, trusting in God that She would provide.

Stories We Tell

Sarah Polley's new film, Women Talking, is opening "in limited" theaters this week. It will open in more theaters January 23, 2023...if all goes well.

The Truths About Reality
or 
Who's Your Daddy?

Director Sarah Polley's third film Stories We Tell is a documentary all about her, and in which she barely appears. In telling the story of her life, she manages to do it in the best way—by mentioning everybody else in her life, making her an observer, reporter, and a happy, but no less disinterested, accident in the process. But, it is also one of a handful of films that dares to consider truth, and what its relationship is to reality.

The project started with a family joke (and, by the way, ends with one of the best last lines in a movie from the past couple years or so)—that Sarah looked nothing like her father. When she was born, her mother Diane would say, probably too much and too loudly, "Look, she's a redhead. How did that happen?" And there was rampant speculation, never uttered in the family until every one had grown up, that maybe Sarah's dad wasn't...her dad.

So, what's the story?

We meet, through interviews and home movies (mixed in with Polley-generated 8mm simulation/recreations, which...when you finally realize it...makes it feel like cheating, but one gets over it) with friends and family of her parents, who give us some of the story. Not all of it, and only what they know, their impressions of it, and their opinions. Diane and Michael Polley were both former actors who came across each other in the Canadian theater circuit, fell in love and got married—his first, her second. Despite the similarities in trade, they couldn't be less alike—she was effusive, bouncy, the life of the party and a general flibbertigibbit; he was studious, thoughtful, writerly, and maybe too dull for her. When they married, she stayed home with the kids, and he quit acting to support them.

The marriage hit a rough patch, and Diane took an acting gig in Toronto and was gone for several weeks. Michael went to visit and see the play, and they rekindled their marriage—when Diane came back home, she was pregnant with Sarah. 

The view-points vary greatly—the siblings are irreverent, but respectful of their mother, who died of cancer very young, and in the film feels like a free spirit in every sense of the word; the father, befuddled but not really caring because he loves his kids, his wife and it is what is; friends worry how much they're revealing about Diane, and the stories stay pretty consistent with minor deviations, except for one important detail—they don't know what happened, and can only offer idle speculation. The movie comes down to a conclusion—Sarah wasn't biologically of Michael, and it must have been one of her co-stars in the play—suspicion falling immediately on the one redhead in the cast.

But, that's just the beginning of the film, and the "hook" of it. What we get is along the lines of the many sides and opinions of Citizen Kane, but the focus being Sarah's mother—whose effervescence belies a complexity and back-story that defies it. The impression one initially gets of her as flighty, darkens and dissipates when one sees her past, and the figure of fun, often dismissed in the interviews with "well, that was Diane..." becomes one you can understand, empathize with, and, ultimately, root a bit for. There's a video clip of her (the real one, not the recreation) singing a satire version of "Ain't Misbehavin'" (called "I'm Misbehavin'") sung with a somewhat "can't help it" ruefulness, that's charming.

But, it doesn't stop there. Once we know best who's Father, it becomes an interesting tale of "who should tell this story/who owns it?" especially considering the effect it might have on the survivors, and how the participants feel about it and "What It All Means." The film becomes Polley's attempt to "tell all sides" even though there are those who think it should be focused on one aspect, with a singular point of view. Polley, the subject, has no axe to grind here, as she wasn't around when all this happened, and is familially invested in...everybody. She displays the same sensitivity and odd humor that she brings to her fictional films, and her editing choices—what she shows and doesn't show, and the way she juxtaposes and does a "he said/she said" with the interviews—makes the film itself fun to watch, despite the twists and turns of the narrative. Interesting, fascinating, and though-provoking.

Sarah Polley—the origin story

Away From Her

Away From Her (Sarah Polley, 2007) Julie Christie did her homework when it came to portraying early-stage Alzheimer's--the intense concentration, and the thousand yard stare, the polite smile to the intimate stranger. And the film does a remarkable job of putting the viewer into the "Alice-in-Wonderland" world of the Alzheimer's care-giver who must endure the pain of dealing with losing the relationship while still having to deal with the patient. The commitment is still there, even though the disease has severed the knowledge of it from patient to care-giver. Sacrifice without reward--makes you realize what being a nurse is like.*

And there's an aspect to Alzheimer's care-giving that's a bit like a lab experiment. Divorced from the ties that the disease has unpinned, one can observe the effect it has on the human being, given the prior knowledge of the sufferer. You can check off what goes, see the timeline disappear, the brain functions narrow and fluctuate, enjoy the false encouragement of "good days." For the Alzheimer's patient, it's a slow-motion float to death—at some stage they're not even aware of their condition. For the caregiver, it's a bit like watching a frog (a very dear frog) sitting in slowly heating water—you can only wait helplessly and steel yourself for the inevitable, as memory, identity, and life slips away. It's a slow death and a long good-bye.

So, in that way, Away from Her is a good primer for the best-case Alzheimer's scenario. Christie's character, Fiona Anderson, is aware of the onset, and in an act of unselfishness, rather than go into denial and paranoia makes the decision to place herself in an assisted living facility, voluntarily giving up the freedom that so many patients cling to, kicking and screaming.

Her husband of 40 years, Grant (Gordon Pinsett, he's wonderful, too) sees the relationship go away in an accelerated fashion when the facility insists on isolating the patient from family members for a required thirty days (I've never heard of such a rule, but then it takes place in Canada).

By the time of Grant's first visit--one he highly anticipates--Fiona has already separated from their relationship, and he struggles mightily to regain it, a combination of wanting to halt the progress of the disease and his own selfishness.

Where that yin and yang pulls him forms the crux of the story, and in my household it led to some pointed discussion about responsibility and relationships, but one must also look at the brutal reality of the disease and the unique way that it eviscerates normalcy.

As I've said Away From Her paints a best-case scenario that is still far from rosy, but as a toe-dip into the issues surrounding dementia and Alzheimer's, it's a pretty effective film, and actor/director/savant Sarah Polley has found a fascinating way of deriving a positive and interestingly nuanced life-lesson out of the experience. Like Orson Welles with Citizen Kane, she was all of 25 when making it.

* The author lost his Mother to Alzheimer's in 2001, if one is so churlish to look for authority. The movie has received a lot of criticism from care-givers who think the movie soft-pedals the disease, and although it does present a best-case scenario and never goes further (actually) than early-stage Alzheimer's it does show, in a perfunctory way, the severing of emotional ties and history a patient can experience and the effect it can have on the care-giver.