Throwing off the weight of oppression

 

   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.  

     

Sarah Polley's fascinating look at her family

Sarah Polley's documentary The Stories We Tell struck me as a cross between a tabloid expose about a startling piece of family history and a philosophical inquiry into the nature of memory, truth and the importance of stories.

With that kind of broad agenda, Polley's film also (and perhaps inevitably) encourages us to think about the nature of documentaries, a genre that might include re-enactments of key events, old home movie footage and images that remind us that we're watching a film.

Polley, of course, is both a director and an actress and, as such, understands the theatrical value of certain disclosures that the film makes, even as she exposes the some of the mechanics of her filmmaking: We see the recording of a voice-over, an eloquent and revealing narration by her father, and at times, we even see the camera.

Polley, a Canadian, contextualizes her movie with an opening quote from Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood: "When you are in the middle of a story, it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion. ... It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you're telling it, to yourself or to someone else."

Perhaps inspired by Atwood's observation, Polley does two complicated things at once: She makes us keenly aware of the odd, inherently shapeless nature of experience and she attunes us to the processes by which those experiences are given structure and meaning.

Because of the movie's major revelation (no, I'm not going to disclose it here), Polley also raises the question of story and ownership; at least one of the people she interviews (she calls them storytellers) vies to establish his version of the story as the most valid. He questions the right of others even to tell the story.

This multi-faceted family tale revolves around Polley's mother, Diane, a woman with an out-sized personality. Diane, who died from cancer, was a vivacious woman, an actress who became the center of attention in a large family.

Polley's siblings, her father, aunts, uncles and family friends become the director's main sources of information. For her part, Polley tries to maintain a kind of authorial neutrality, as the story unfolds.

Before Polley concludes this family tale, she manages to tether the movie's more abstract elements to emotional realities that can be quite affecting. Her's is not a dry, theoretical or (heaven forbid) meditative movie, but a story anchored in flesh and blood, joy and pain.

Polley, who directed two features (Take This Waltz and Away From Her) prior to this documentary, is a smart and gifted filmmaker, and although she breaks no ground stylistically, her documentary reminded me of why Errol Morris, who makes wonderful films (Fog of War, Mr. Death, A Brief History of Time) that often are classified as documentaries, prefers to call his work ... well ... films, why he's leery of the term "documentary."

I've seen The Stories We Tell compared to Akira Kurosawa's Rashamon, a movie in which the same basic story was told from a variety of different perspectives, each full of its own vested interests. I didn't see Polley's film quite that way, primarily because the major facts of the story aren't in dispute. What's up for grabs is what those facts might mean, and who's in the best position to construct the story they seem to demand.

She's unsure what she wants

Can a marriage crumble gently? Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz suggests the answer is "yes."

Take This Waltz -- a new movie from director Sarah Polley -- hits, misses and sometimes seems to be searching for a point as it follows the emotionally inconclusive life of Margot (Michelle Williams), a woman who's slipping into the final stages of a crumbling marriage. Although there are good scenes in Take This Waltz, which Polley also wrote, the movie doesn't amount to as much as you might hope, particularly considering that Polley's debut feature -- Away From Her -- was a restrained and quietly moving story about a couple dealing with the onset of the wife's Alzheimer's. The story in Take This Waltz is driven by Margot's long and not always intriguing flirtation with one of her neighbors (Luke Kirby). Kirby's Daniel is an artist who supports himself by pulling a rickshaw around Toronto. Very quaint. Margot's husband Lou (a surprisingly credible Seth Rogen) spends most of his time experimenting in the couple's kitchen. He's writing a cookbook about the many ways in which chicken can be prepared. Polley may have wanted to bring Margot to a point at which she's able to free herself from both the intoxicating pull of new romance and loyalty to her husband of five years. At times, it feels as if Polley drops story obligations to say something that she thinks needs addressing. A nude shower scene at a local pool, for example, seems calculated to show how women's bodies look when they're not being portrayed from an erotically charged male perspective. And in what amounts to a reach, Polley casts comic Sarah Silverman as Lou's sister; Silverman proves interesting enough as a recovering alcoholic who's as acerbic as she is self-aware. Nothing about Take This Waltz made me less respectful of Polley's talent. She's a nervy director who's willing to take chances, and she shows a real flair for casual interaction. I liked what I liked about Take This Waltz, ignored the rest and look forward to seeing where Polley, still best known as an actress, goes next.