Female Film Critics 24/375
Both intimate and expansive in exploring weighty ideas, Women Talking lingers in its intellectual engagement, never cynical or dismissive, ever provocative and stimulating. Sarah Polley has crafted one of the best films of the decade, never mind of the year.
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Morality, autonomy, agency, and community intersect in writer/director Sarah Polley‘s absorbing drama Women Talking. Literary in its pedigree — it’s adapted from Canadian author Miriam Toews’ same-named 2018 novel — and play-like in its simplicity of setting and scope, the thought-provoking film explores what happens when a group of women in a conservative, isolated religious colony must make a decision that will affect all of their lives forever.
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Writer/director Sarah Polley’s new film Women Talking has received nearly universal acclaim from critics. It’s pretty remarkable that a film based on such horrible abuse can have moments of joy and humor, but that was baked into the novel by Miriam Toews, on which the screenplay is based. In advance of the film’s release, Toews, writer/director Sarah Polley, Frances McDormand (co-star of the movie and one of its producers), and Dede Gardner, president of Plan B, got together for a spirited discussion and virtual Q&A about Women Talking. Those taking part were asked about the process of interpreting the true story and how it took shape.
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Sarah Polley’s cinema adaptation of Miriam Toews’ novel Women Talking translates with astonishing power. A push and pull between faith and feminism, the story centers on three generations of Mennonite women who re trying to come to terms with the sexual and physical violence they suffer within their small community. After years of sweeping the assaults under the rug in fear of the community’s patriarchal dominance and tradition, the women convene, in secret, to discuss their fate and that of their female compatriotes.
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Those who enjoy ensemble dramas will likely appreciate filmmaker Sarah Polley’s Women Talking – especially those who support the #MeToo movement and who will gladly listen to some talented ladies who have a huge decision to make. In 2010, the women of a community who have had enough must make a decision about leaving their isolated Mennonite colony that allows the men to drug and rape the women while bloodily beating them in the night, initially blaming an animal like a goat or Satan or attributing the physical assaults as acts of female imagination.
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The women are talking about whether they should forgive, fight or leave the men who have been systematically drugging and raping them. The men who are their neighbors, their husbands, their fathers. The film is based on Miriam Toews’ novel, which is loosely based on true events that took place in a Mennonite community in Bolivia, where more than 100 women were drugged with livestock anesthetic and sexually assaulted in their beds. The only reason the eight women in the movie get to actually talk at all is because the men are gone. They were arrested – FOR THEIR OWN SAFETY!
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In Sarah Polley’s searing ensemble, there are indeed women talking but it is what they are talking about and who they are that grips us from the start. The subject these conservative Mennonite women gathered in a barn are talking about is whether to forgive the men. For what, we don’t know at first but it is gradually revealed as something most would find unforgivable.
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There’s a whole damn new cinematic subgenre that’s been developing in the past decade or so, and it’s an ugly one: The Misogynist “Critique” Of Misogyny. Writer-director Alex Garland was an early perpetrator with his lady-sexbot drama Ex Machina, and now he makes a stunning return to form with his enraging yet monotonous Men.
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I wish I could state unequivocally that this is a film perfect for this moment in time, and perhaps it is. But not in a good way. It may be that director Alex Garland has, well, a thing about women. Consider his screenplay for 28 Days Later (directed by Danny Boyle), a clever twist on the zombie genre that posits a pandemic of rage that infects the blood, set loose on the world by a female animal rights activist. Even the title hints at the undertones of menstrual madness.
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One great blessing of the current trend toward diversity and inclusion is that Netflix green-lit this scathingly honest psychological exploration of the ambivalence of motherhood, trusting actress Maggie Gyllenhaal to make her auspicious directing debut unraveling its psychological complexity.
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