Women Talking: OTTplay Reviews Oscar-Winning Film

A Difficult Conversation

In Sarah Polley's film, the women in an off-the-grid religious colony must decide how to move forward from a monstrous betrayal. Prahlad Srihari reviews the Best Adapted Screenplay winner from this year's Oscars

T/W: The following review contains mentions of the depictions of sexual assault in 'Women Talking'. Reader discretion is advised.

AS WOMEN OF FAITH, how do you reconcile the idea of a merciful God who preaches forgiveness with the idea of an all-powerful God who allows unimaginable suffering? How do you forgive those who sin against you when forgiveness can be conflated with permission to keep sinning? How do you reclaim meaning from a faith whose very defenders have destroyed all meaning with violence? How do you know who you are if you have always been silenced and never been free? As a filmmaker, how do you make a talky tale about people debating faith and forgiveness cinematic?

These are just a few of the questions Sarah Polley confronts in her film, Women Talking. Much like the Miriam Toews novel it’s based on, the film draws from the shocking events that came to light in a Bolivian Mennonite colony in 2009. Here, we follow the mothers, grandmothers, daughters, sisters and wives of an off-the-grid religious colony who must decide in concert how to move forward from a monstrous betrayal. For years, the women have woken up bruised, sore, disoriented — with no memory of the night before. For years, the colony elders have accused the women of lying, dismissed their complaints as female hysteria, or explained them away as the work of ghosts or demons summoned by their sins. As it turns out, it was neither ghosts nor demons but the fathers, sons and husbands of their own colony who had been creeping through the windows to drug and rape the women in their beds at night. When the truth emerges, the elders weaponise the women’s piety to cover up the men’s barbarity. The survivors are instructed to forgive their rapists or risk jeopardising their place in heaven.

STREAM 'WOMEN TALKING'

WOMEN TALKING

A Searing Look At Navigating & Negotiating Trauma

By Prahlad Srihari

As the film opens, the women come together for a referendum on how to respond. The men of the colony are out in the city to post bail for the accused. Before they return in 48 hours, the women must make a choice: 1. forgive and forget; 2. stay and fight; 3. leave. As the women have been denied access to education to keep them ignorant and compliant, the three choices are illustrated with corresponding symbols on the ballot: clouds over a field, a couple clashing with knives, and a horse looking behind. Option 1 unsurprisingly has next to no takers. For, to stay and forgive would be to accept the status quo and sentence generations of women to a lifetime of suffering. With the votes tied between options 2 and 3, an ad hoc council of women gathers in a hayloft to brainstorm the most suitable collective response. As suits a democratic exercise, the women engage in debate. The rhetoric often slides into semantics: what leaving means as opposed to fleeing, what forgiving means when it has been forced upon you, and what love means when those you love are also those you fear.

All this dialectical wrangling does sound tailor-made for a stage production. Nonetheless, a film offers a sense of privacy in a way that a play can’t. Granted the nature of the story, privacy is inseparable from its proceedings. As the women talk in secret, Polley entreats us to listen. The camera puts us in the hayloft, allowing us to sit in on their symposium. Words alone can never capture the depth of their traumas, much less exorcise their pain. So, the film relies on Hildur Guðnadóttir’s acoustic guitar and strings to articulate the rage fomenting within and locate a glimmer of hope.

As an actor-turned-filmmaker, Polley has no trouble drawing out fervent performances from her ensemble. Embracing the spirit of collaboration rather than competition, Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey and Frances McDormand embody a group of women bonded by faith but divided by their survival instincts. Each woman has processed trauma differently, their response coloured by individual experiences and familial circumstances. More thorny questions arise as a result. If the women leave, should the male children be left behind or brought along? If the sons will be joining the women in the exodus, what should be the cut-off age? At what age can a boy be categorically considered a lost cause? Can it ever be categorical?

Salome (Foy), whose four-year-old daughter has been raped, justifiably wants to stay and fight. If she won’t get justice, she will at least get retribution. Early on in the film, we see Salome attempt to kill one of the perpetrators with a scythe. “I will become a murderer if I stay,” she confesses to the women. On the opposite side of the debate is Mariche (Jessie Buckley), who suffers abuse at the hands of her husband on an almost daily basis but remains convinced forgiveness is the only option. On the fence sits Ona (Rooney Mara), the even-tempered arbitrator pregnant from her own attack, whose eloquently phrased questions lead to probing insights as to the best course forward.

As none of the women are literate, they ask the boys’ schoolteacher August (Ben Whishaw) to transcribe the minutes of the meeting. August is a man hopelessly in love with Ona, but whose love for her is complicated by his desire to see her escape a cloistered and preyed-upon life in the colony. If Toews told her story through August’s minutes for the practical reason of the women’s illiteracy, Polley shifts the role of narrator to Mariche’s teenage daughter Autje (Kate Hallett) for the practical reason of creating a vessel who can pass down the story for future generations. In the film, Autje is recounting the story to Ona’s baby born after the epilogue. This creative choice is a hopeful one that suggests the women succeeded in building a more promising future.

As with any film that becomes a pressurised container of divergent viewpoints, characters can start to feel like mouthpieces, especially when all are mostly defined by their trauma. The only one who isn’t — August — exists to play the role of the token male ally and prove Ona’s “not all men” point. In addition, Polley doesn’t let the film’s more uncomfortable but revealing moments play out organically to their end. Like when Melvin (August Winter), the young transgender man whose assault forces him into going public with his transition, is called by his name for the first time in a hurrah moment. Or when Mariche calls Ona a “whore” in anger on being questioned why she never stands up to her husband. Or when Scarface Janz (McDormand) abruptly leaves before the women have had the opportunity to confront her internalised misogyny. It’s these underdeveloped moments that prevent a serious debate from becoming a searing one.

Though Polley doesn’t depict the sexual violence endured by the women, its shadow hangs over every scene. Brief glimpses of women waking up confused and screaming to bruised thighs and blood-soaked sheets, enlarged tummies and morning sickness, capture the horror of being sexually assaulted while tranquilised. In a heart-breaking but powerful scene, when Salome’s four-year-old Miep complains about pain, all the women pause the discussion, circle around the little girl, and sing a hymn in unison to lull her to sleep. One flashback shows a male attacker flee after being caught outside a window. Polley otherwise keeps her focus centred on the women of the community who argue, joke and pray as they launch the quiet revolution of rebuilding their lives. Autje and her cousin Neitje (Liv McNeil) weaving their braids together in a literal act of bonding is a gesture that signals this quiet revolution.

As Toews did in her novel, Polley opens her film with a disclaimer — “an act of female imagination” — that doubles as a reclaimer, subverting a statement often used to invalidate women’s accusations. The film’s washed-out colour palette conveys how a culture of sexual violence and enforced silence has drained the life out of the colony. The desaturation also foregrounds a hidebound community which appears out-of-time, but not so out-of-time to warrant a black-and-white scheme. It is only when a van driving through the colony blasts The Monkees’ 1968 hit “Daydream Believer” and its driver invites the residents to be counted for the 2010 census, that the year becomes clear. The arrival of the census taker jars like a collision of two worlds. At the same time, it acts as a reminder, alerting the women that the clock is ticking and the men will soon return. So, they best hurry up with the decision that will radically transform all their lives.

At one point in the film, Ona speaks of dragonflies — setting out on journeys so long the destination can only be reached by their descendants — to describe the challenges that must be overcome by one generation of women so the next can have a better future. For the women to leave would mean to enter an unknown world for the first time without ever having seen a map or learnt to read and write. But “hope for the unknown”, as Ona insists, is better than “hatred of the familiar.” By letting the past speak to the present while looking to the future, Women Talking tells a story that is at once devastating and hopeful.

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