Review: WOMEN TALKING

A closed religious community that calls itself the Colony is disrupted when a man is caught fleeing the scene of a rape. The rapes are in themselves not unusual but part of a culture of the rigid patriarchy of the micro society. The women (and sometimes girls) are subject to frequent sexual attacks under the rustic roofying of cow tranquiliser. The accused gives up the names of everyone else he knows is culpable. The men buggy it into town to go the bail, leaving the children to play and the women to talk. The women are expected to agree to forgive their attackers or be expelled from the Colony and so the Kingdom of Heaven. The last part sounds like a great deal to me but these women are generations in, unquestioning of their faith, and they do have binds of parenthood and family to consider. They assemble in the barn and talk. Stay and do nothing? Stay and fight? Leave?

The discussion begins shakily. Tensions reveal themselves, disputes rise and the question of what happens if they abandon the only society they've known. We've seen the whole community at prayer, a kind of Millet set piece with heads bowed at pews in a silence that could be used as emulsifier. A young female voice narrates sparely, addressing the child being carried by one of the women in the assembly. While none of the attacks are depicted on screen there are many cutaways to the immediate consequences. The dialogue moves cautiously at first, like a freed hostage taking their first unbelieving steps out of their confinement. There is fresh trauma and whatever it becomes when stretched into a lifetime with only a sawdust and porridge flavour of religion to provide solace. There's a lot of work to do and it's going to take some doing to get some of these minds changed.

Sarah Polley's tenth directorial film is a work of sustained restraint, keeping a ceiling of clear wrap over emotions that come from trauma, loosening here when one of the senior figures tells yet another homespun parable about her horses, tightening strongly when the culture of violence needs to be given voice. This doesn't mean it ends up bland but rather the shifts of intensity offer relief from confronting statements that will allow relatively easy passage through the hundred minutes of screen time. This film, which really does what its title says it will, does not drag for a moment of the talky bulk of it. It's when this turns to action we just want it to start hurrying up.

Polley uses a painterly pallet for the long rustic day, desaturating the warmth to leave an earth brown wash which stresses the weight of the oppression and evokes a kind of rural gothic. It also suggests nostalgia of a type that allows the kind of protected society to sustain, a status quo of pioneer privation and harsh justice based on a jealously guarded filtration of a bronze age text. It's a text that the women are prevented from learning through enforced illiteracy. This look and feel can be by turns oppressive and warm and an astute use of scoring (by film composer star Hildur Gudnadottir) allows for a tonal balance. Balance is what holds up the blocking as the camera and performers' interplay gives a sense of action to the constant dialogue. While the explosively emotive Salome is typically in motion, her contrarian counterpart Mariche sits forward turning her head rather than her body to respond. the teenagers who are often at the edges of the ensemble, provide a witness and choric function. That's a lot of verbiage to say that this talky movie is very physical. It's worth recalling that Polley began as an actor, aware of the value of motion and stillness but is also an accomplished director who knows how to do the same with a camera.

It can take a little longer than you might expect for the individual viewpoints to be established in the assembly and I did get restless at the similarity of positions and how easy it was to lose track of some threads, trying to follow each. Eventually, relaxing into the general movement is rewarded with an appreciable forward motion as differences are stripped to barer conflict.

There are some heavyweight performances supporting this. Claire Foy's Salome has a fire lit by ghastly experience. Jessie Buckley's Mariche is more survivor, keeping her poise self-protective and her retorts resistant. Frances McDormand is only on screen briefly (revealed in the opening scene) but if your thoughts don't return to her throughout you've blinked too long. Rooney Mara's life-affirming optimism is delivered in one of the most sedative full face smiles imaginable but she, like all the others, passes through breaking points in the course of the talk. Ben Wishaw, one of my favourite U.K. character actors, is August, the sole adult male given lines who serves as the women's notary. He is the outside world, having returned from his family's banishment to teach the Colony's boys. The fragility that the beating of the experience has left him with renders him intelligent but awkward and timid. Virtually imploding at every turn the notion that he will stay regardless of how the women vote hangs over the story.

So, it's 2023 do we really need a story that tells us that men are bad and women are victims? Well, this year brought a major legacy of the administrative disaster of the Trump years to action, the overturning of Roe vs Wade which enshrined the right to abortion across the USA. Trigger laws in thirteen states came into immediate effect variously constraining access to abortion or banning it outright. It really is 2023 and somethings really are racing backwards. Also, the source novel (same title) is based on events that took place in Bolivia in 2009. Sarah Polley is Canadian and a good swag of the cast are British, Irish and from outside the lands of the accents they speak but there is no commitment to location. We might well be hearing Anglicised dialogue from the Spanish. the Southern Cross becomes a talking point and your eyes would need to be good to see it from western USA. But the point is that it doesn't have to be anywhere specific as its concerns are as old as humanity wherever it has roamed and settled. 

Is it preachy? It has to be. The atrocities discussed might sound extreme (what point to make them more easily digestible?) but the response of the women to effect their own local apocalypse in pursuit of freedom from lives of trauma is genuine, ongoing and legitimate even in this rarefied form. And it does play fair, describing itself as "an act of female imagination" in the opening credit sequence. If it does break into dogma momentarily there is genuine gravity to command that and warmth to mitigate it. I couldn't help but be mindful of the rasping cries by one of Polley's fellow Canucks to repel boarders who dare to attack the status quo (there is even a moment involving an act of live-naming a trans figure ... but no, I'll swear off hearing a second of Jordan Peterson's review of this one, thanks). This is not presented as a lecture, a sermon or even history, it's more accurately a cry for acknowledgement, and it's loud and powerful.