Polley adaptation gives voice to traumas of assault victims
What happens when your home no longer feels like home? When the rules of your life no longer make sense? When your body is not your own? When your children are not safe and neither are you? Do you look for justice? Revenge? Apologies? Do you make amends to keep the peace? Or do you search for something else?
For “Women Talking,” director Sarah Polley approaches this societal, cultural conundrum from a different angle and in doing so makes the conversation undeniable. The women in her film have no memory of the assaults at all. What they do have are bruises, blood, babies and a trauma so deep, so intractable, that they no longer feel like themselves.
This isn’t helped by their faith, and the elders in their isolated religious colony who tell them that it was ghosts or Satan who did it or that they’re lying to get attention. But the film begins with an indisputable reality: One of the attackers is caught and this has led to a series of events in which three generations of women have 24 hours to decide what to do before they return, demanding forgiveness. Their three options as they see it are 1. Do nothing; 2. Stay and fight; 3. Leave. So, they talk.
The film is an adaptation of a 2018 book by Miriam Toews, which was itself inspired by a real story out of a Mennonite community in Bolivia. Polley’s version is expressionistic and lyrical, biting and poetic. The conversations are messy, the feminism contradictory and the trauma complicated. Among the grandmothers (Frances McDormand, Sheila McCarthy and Judith Ivey), there are those who have lived with these unspoken truths for so long that abandoning the end goal, the kingdom of heaven, is not an option. There are some who are open to a conversation and see a light.
The younger mothers are different, too. Jessie Buckley’s Mariche is full of bitterness and nowhere to channel it. Claire Foy’s Salome is bubbling over with rage. Rooney Mara’s Ona, newly pregnant from an assault, is serious but romantic, looking at things as a poet might.
The teens (Kate
Hallett, Liv McNeil and Michelle McLeod) giggle and act out, too. No one has processed what’s happened in the same way.
Conversations are often interrupted. Tensions rise and are punctured, sometimes with rage, sometimes with laughter.
The men are not part of this conversation. They barely get names. And only one gets to bear witness to the proceedings, Ben Whishaw’s August. I’m not sure it would be possible for his performance to be sweeter or more heartbreaking.
Polley and cinematographer Luc Montpellier shoot the story in a muted palette, not quite sepia but not quite color either, reflecting the limited world of its characters. “Women Talking” is told like a folk tale, from sometime in the future.
“Women Talking” is not melodramatic or desperate or exploitative. It is astute and urgent and may just help those previously unable to find words or even coherent feelings for their own traumatic experiences. And hopefully it might just inspire more works of wild female imagination.
MPA rating: PG-13 (for some strong language, bloody images, sexual assault and mature thematic content) Running time: 1:43
How to watch: In theaters