If you were looking for an evening's diversion, it might not occur to you to spend it hanging out with a group of Mennonite women living in an isolated community in a Latin American country.
Grim, serious, and weighted by patriarchal oppression, Women Talking makes Amish country seem luxe by comparison.
Forbidding and talky, director Sarah Polley's movie, adapted from a novel by Canadian author Miriam Toews, tells a reality-based story about women seeking libration from a calcified society that hides its sins behind a religious mask.
And, yes, you read that “reality-based” sentence right. The story inspired by a 2011 event in Bolivia in which seven men from a Mennonite colony were convicted of rape.
The story focuses on the response of the colony's women. Outraged by men who drug them with cow tranquilizers, rape them, and then blame ghosts or demons, the women arrive at a point of decision.
As a whole, the community's women are divided about what to do. So eight women form a kind of high council of the oppressed, retreating to a hayloft to discuss options that will impact the rest.
The women are able to talk frankly because the men have gone to town to bail out the attackers after the authorities intervened. We don't need to see the men because this isn't a movie with two sides: It's a movie about what happens when women no longer can tolerate a soul-crushing system.
Three choices emerge: Do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. The men have given the women two days to decide to forgive them, so the clock is ticking. The faux rectitude of the men’s position — only forgiveness will be tolerated — needs no further comment.
Because the men have forbidden the women to learn to read or write, a black-sheep male (Ben Whishaw) has been selected as recording secretary. Whishaw's August occupies an uneasy position vis a vis the community. His mother was expelled for speaking her mind. He left and attended college but returned to become a teacher for the young men in the community. He’s an outlier.
Frances McDormand, one of the movie's producers, appears briefly as a woman committed to upholding the prevailing order.
Mostly, the movie plays as an ensemble piece built around powerful actresses: Jessie Buckley, Rooney Mara, Judith Ivey, Sheila McCarthy, Claire Foy, and Michelle McLeod.
As the women debate, we learn a bit about them. Mara's Ona, a woman with a dimpled beatific smile, has become pregnant after one of the rapes. August is in love with Ona, but the stern environment isn't exactly conductive to romance.
Foy's character bursts with fury over the rape of her four-year-old daughter, a rage so powerful it frightens her.
Few would argue with the movie's message. These women want equality, freedom to express themselves, and faith that isn't used like a cudgel, inducing resignation and despair.
The last point is important; these are women of faith, influenced by the need to forgive and by religiously inspired pacifism. They don't want to abandon all they hold sacred. They're also reluctant to leave older sons, who may already have drunk the colony Kool-Aid.
Polley and cinematographer Luc Montpellier cloak the movie's images in weighty browns. The visual environment matches the strictures under which these women live, making it clear that throwing off its terrors won't be easy.
Polley's cast embraces the variety of possible responses to the movie's central predicament, although it takes a while to keep track of who's who. And the characters sometimes feel as if they've been reduced to the positions they take.
But then, in a way, they have been -- by the abuse they've faced.
Women Talking might have been more powerful had it been presented on a stage, where it could have benefited from the kind of theatrical electricity that creates its own urgency.
In the end, though, Women Talking gets under the skin and its shocking story compels. Polley makes us want to escape this stifling, barren world in which obedience has conquered love.
Put another way, we want these woman to find the new lives they've only begun to imagine.
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