‘Women Talking’: Political debate becomes declaration of independence
“What follows is an act of female imagination.”
Are any eight words more terrifying? In “Women Talking,” Sarah Polley’s impassioned if inescapably didactic adaptation of Miriam Toews’s novel, a group of Mennonite women gather in a barn to debate how to respond to the sexual assault that women in their community have endured for decades. Raped after being drugged with cattle tranquilizer, they’ve been told their injuries are the result of “ghosts, or Satan.” When a girl recognizes the face of her would-be attacker, he names names, and now he and his fellow perpetrators and bystanders are in jail. As “Women Talking” opens, women assemble in the crepuscular shadows of the barn to decide what they will do: Nothing? Stay and fight? Or leave?
What ensues is the kind of dialogue-driven movie that, when done well, achieves the soaring drama of such similar exercises
as “12 Angry Men,” “Inherit the Wind” and “A Man for All Seasons.” While Polley’s film - cowritten with Toews - doesn’t always ascend to similar heights, once the viewer accepts its mannered style and bluntly literalistic vernacular, it builds to a kind of unadorned grandeur. Within the first few minutes, the main characters make their cases with ferocity, quiet logic or transcendent spiritual belief, depending on their temperament: Pregnant
Ona, played with beatific calm by Rooney Mara, proffers her idea of a just outcome, wherein the men agree that women will be equal and educated members of a reconfigured community. Claire Foy’s Salome, outraged at what has been done and condoned, is far less serene, as is spiky Mariche (Jessie Buckley), who advocates for staying, with misgivings that become clearer as the women’s debate ebbs, flows and finally comes to its exhilarating conclusion.
Set over the course of two days in which the women are supposed to decide their own fate, “Women Talking” possesses a cramped, theatrical quality. (Interestingly enough, Toews based her novel on a real-life case that occurred in a Bolivian Mennonite colony in 2009.) Although Polley cuts away to quick flashbacks and stylized still shots telegraphing women’s isolation even amid close proximity, most of the action occurs in the hay-strewn barn, filmed by Luc Montpellier in dreary shades of gray. (Kate Hallett, playing a young girl named Autje, provides the somber, “Days of Heaven”-like narration.) The dour, desaturated palette gives “Women Talking” an appropriate air of timelessness but also saps vitality and visual interest from a frame that is taken up with - what else? - women talking. The effect becomes increasingly oppressive as the arguments wax and wane, about everything from the etymological difference between “leaving” and “fleeing” to the nature of forgiveness.
Intellectually, those arguments are admittedly fascinating and undoubtedly timely five years into the #MeToo movement: As Ona, Mariche, Salome and their elders (played by Frances McDormand and Judith Ivey, among
others) parry back and forth, the effect is akin to a verbal quilting bee, with a complicated pattern emerging. What is knowing, and what are the conditions for knowing? If the men are accountable for their actions, are they truly guilty when they’re products of a sexist culture? Is forgiveness tantamount to permission? How is power properly understood, wielded and conferred?
At its most shattering, “Women Talking” confronts audiences with a bleak, uncompromising portrait of generational trauma, as the physical and psychic toll of decades of abuse becomes clear and comes due. “I’m sorry,” says August (Ben Whishaw), a trusted schoolteacher who has agreed to be the women’s recording secretary. “One day, I’d like to hear that from someone who should be saying it,” comes the reply.
That exchange gets to the fulcrum of “Women Talking,” which centers on the tension between violent and unjust systems and individual responsibility, a tension that at one point extends to the women themselves, when it comes to their complicity in turning a blind eye to the realities they’ve suffered and, perhaps, passively perpetuated. For all its thematic relevance and titular specificity, “Women Talking” is ultimately about what it means to be human, and what it takes to be truly free. “When we’ve liberated ourselves, we’ll have to ask ourselves who we are,” Ona says evenly at one point.
With skill and sensitivity, Polley turns an on-the-nose political debate into a bracing declaration of independence.