‘Women Talking’ — is anybody listening?
Sarah Polley’s harrowing film illustrates the damage religion can do to women
“12 Angry Women”? It would never fly.
“Men Talking”? Maybe. Funny what happens when you switch the genders of these two popular films, created 65 years apart.
Sarah Polley, director of “Women Talking,” which centres on a group of women who must decide whether to stay or leave their backward religious colony after it’s discovered that many of them were sexually assaulted, has pointed out in numerous interviews how the name of her film rankles some people.
While travelling to promote the movie, she says male customs officers would often comment on the movie’s title if it came up, making snide remarks about how they get enough of women talking at home.
Says Polley: “People hear the title ‘Women Talking’ differently than they hear a title like ‘12 Angry Men.’ For some reason, the very act of women talking sounds offensive to some people. So, I think, just getting people to watch it is the biggest challenge.”
Her Oscar screenwriting win for the film on Sunday night (she was overlooked for Best Director) — along with its Best Picture nomination — should help boost ticket sales.
Still, it’s galling that Polley, who adapted the film from the novel of the same name by Mennoniteraised Manitoba-born writer Miriam Toews, feels the need to defend the title. “It’s not called ‘Women Shouting,’ it’s not called ‘Women Scolding’ — it’s called ‘Women Talking.’”
Both “12 Angry Men” and “Women Talking” are masterful studies of the challenges of consensus-building and the cinematography of conversation. The films have elements in common, including a cloistered setting (in the first, a sweltering unairconditioned jury room, in the second, a sun dappled hayloft) as well as a ticking time bomb of a deadline to make life-altering decisions.
In the first film, the fate of a teenage boy, accused of killing his abusive father, hangs in the balance as the jury determines if there is enough reasonable doubt to acquit. In the second, eight women are charged with the responsibility of determining the fate of the women in their colony before their menfolk, who have left to post bail for the rapists, return. They grapple with the aftermath of wide scale sexual abuse and attempt to reconcile their trauma with their devotion to their faith.
In “12 Angry Men” there are specific rules and legal precedents to follow. The men scream and almost come to blows (“12 men, turned into 12 clawing animals,” proclaims the urgent voiceover in the movie trailer). They rarely share intimate details of their lives, save for Juror 3, the last holdout to vote to acquit, who finally changes his mind after realizing his furor toward the teen defendant is rooted in his fractured relationship with own son.
For the characters in “Women Talking,” there are no precedents to follow, save the rules of their religion which dictate that to not forgive the perpetrators is a sin that will bar them from heaven.
They cling steadfastly to their faith, even though it’s their faith that keeps them illiterate, shut away from the wider world, subservient, and thus vulnerable to violence.
They’ve been indoctrinated to betray themselves by a holy book they take literally. As the Bible tells them in 1 Timothy 2:12, “You shall not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.”
But these women don’t stay quiet. They talk and they listen, they rage and they weep. And in the end, together, they figure out what they need to do.
Anger, or at least righteous anger of the kind depicted in “12 Angry Men,” is seen as a good thing in men. Not so much in women. When it comes to religion, women have a lot to be angry about — not just by how they are victimized by rigid fundamentalist sects such as the obscure Mennonite colony in “Women Talking,” but also by more mainstream religions, which silence women by forbidding them from having leadership roles in their patriarchal organizations.
Fundamentalism, of course, thrives the whole world over, even in “progressive” nations like the U.S., where the religious right wields influence over public policy and has managed to turn back gains for women, including reproductive rights.
The Christian Film & Television’s Movie Guide dismisses “Women Talking” as “marred by false theology and some feminism” and seems to be more affronted by the “woke transgender content about a traumatized rape victim who now identifies as a man,” than it is to the horrors committed on the abused women.
In Polley’s film, the simple act of talking is subversive. Once the truth comes out about this true-life story — that over a period of years females in the colony were systematically raped after being subjected to a chemical spray used to anaesthetise cattle, and that their confusion about waking up bloodied and bruised with ripped clothes, was not, as their elders tried to convince them, an act of the devil or the result of their “wild female imagination,” but acts of evil committed upon them by the men of their own community — they have their own #MeToo moment.
Except in this horse-and-buggy world this moment doesn’t happen on social media, but in a bucolic hayloft where the women sit tightly together on bales of straw, the younger girls seeking comfort by braiding each other’s hair, the older women singing the old hymns of their faith.
Their talking is focussed on the deep moral questions that will determine their futures: Should they stay and “fight back” (how exactly
they will fight back is never fully explained). Should they forgive? Is forgiveness even possible in these circumstances? Should they seek revenge? And if they do, what’s worse, to go to hell for murdering an offender (as one of the women, whose child was raped, threatens she would do) or to go to hell for disobeying the elders and what they think God expects of them? Do they do nothing? Do they leave? And if they leave, do they bring their teenage sons, some of whom might have done harm to the women, with them?
The world of “Women Talking” is an imagined one where the women take hold of their agency (spoiler alert here) by taking hold of the reins of their rickety Mennonite buggies to head down a long, isolated dirt road and into what the audience hopes will be a more expansive future for them beyond the horizon.
The real-life story, however, doesn’t end so happily. Most of the victimized Mennonite women stayed in their colony. Some advocated for the men to come back. According to a groundbreaking Vice report on the aftermath of the case, a code of silence descended following the guilty verdict of eight men in 2011.
Thanks to “Women Talking,” created with wild female imagination by a holy trinity of creative talent — writer Miriam Toews, director Polley and producer Frances McDormand — the world now knows what happened to these women.
“I just want to thank the Academy for not being mortally offended by the words ‘women’ and ‘talking’ so close together like that,” Polley said after winning her Oscar.
She finished her speech by repeating the last line of the film, which is delivered to a newborn female baby, a descendent of one of the violated women: “Your story will be different from ours.”
May it be so.