Women Talking

dir: Sarah Polley

2022

This is a really powerful, confronting film that I deeply enjoyed watching.

It is also a complete cop out.

My frustration with the latter aspect I’m only going to explain later on, because I am far more positive about it rather than negative. And the negative for me comes from something outside of the flick.

It puts me in a similar position to which The Woman King put me in, where fact and fiction collide to the detriment of us all.

Women Talking is set in what is called a Mennonite Colony. They are not the Amish. They’re a different crowd of luddites and religious fanatics who eschew modern ways because they are of the Devil.

The main difference between these jerks and the Amish jerks is that Mennonite men don’t grow beards. They do use horses & buggies, they don’t use electricity in their homes and barns. And they happily oppress their women as best they can.

The film, this film, is about a terrible crime, a staggeringly horrible crime. I am referring to multiple violations as one crime, because of its enormity. I cannot even believe that this happened. But it did, in our reality. And not that long ago.

This film springs from the reality of what happened, but gives us a response that has nothing to do with reality, as in, nothing that happens in this movie necessarily happened in this Colony. It might have. We’ll never know. But, based on some reporting I read recently, it never actually happened.

I don’t mean the crime – I mean the women’s response to it.

Which is why the film opens with a title card that says something like “This is a work of feminine imagination.” This is what a woman wished had happened after a community of Mennonite women responded to that which is impossible to respond to.

As the film opens, a woman wakes up, covered in bruises and wonders what has happened. The women of this community: young, old, married, single, children; wake up with horrible headaches, and signs of having been raped.

They have been told for years that they are lying, they are making things up, maybe it’s the Devil, maybe it’s ‘that time of the month’ and other similar levels of constant gaslighting.

But the men know what’s going on. The elders. The ones who decide what happens in the colony, who decide that women aren’t worth educating, not worth listening to, not worth even regarding as fully human, they also command that their religion dictates that it is so.

When it’s revealed that the men of the Colony have been drugging and raping the women of the Colony, the women are commanded that they are to forgive their rapists, or they will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

These women, deliberately, know nothing of the world, the world as it is or the world as it was. They don’t know where in the world they are. They don’t know numbers, or letters, or anything beyond the backbreaking labour they are obligated to supply, and the subservient role they are obligated to play.

They don’t know that their religion is absolute bullshit. How could they? This life is all they know.

But after they are told that they will be forgiving their rapists, the men who have raped them, and their children, their mothers, their grandmothers, or risk expulsion or damnation, the fundamental, stark unfairness of it jolts them into coming together and talking about what their future must be.

We only see one man throughout the film: August (Ben Whishaw), who is there at the request of the women to record their debate, for a posterity they can only imagine (not knowing anything about books beyond the Bible, which they know from memory, but not from reading it). The other men lurk as specters, on the edges of vision, with the threat of their return. They have left the colony in order to go bail out the ones arrested by the authorities, thus allowing the womenfolk a day or two to decide in relative peace.

What to decide… To us, I mean us cosmopolitan atheist types with smartphones and room humidifiers AND dehumidifiers, there’s no debate and no choices involved.

But these women…they have less choices, and less agency than the women in Afghanistan, in Iran, in Saudi Arabia, in China, in North Korea, in Texas, in Alabama, oh, in lots of places.

When they initially formulate their alternatives, they think, automatically “well, we could do nothing.” It’s the usual, human thought. Something terrible has happened, but, hey, why rock the boat? If you rock the boat, something even worse could happen.

These women don’t even have a boat. But they consider the alternatives: Do Nothing, Stay and Fight, and Leave.

The women, being a group of people, have different views. Some women, like Scarface Janz (Frances McDormand), think this is all foolishness, that women shouldn’t even be debating anything. Nothing will change, nothing should change, as it always was is how it always will be.

No doubt she has been raped before, her fragile daughter too, and eventually so will her blind granddaughter. And she is resigned to it, believing the tenets of her faith that a woman’s lot is to suffer and that’s it. Maybe there’s some eternal reward, maybe there isn’t. She’s not about to change anything now. They should all stay, they will all stay, because it’s not like they have any choices. She then disappears from the film, popping up only to glare at the other women for presuming to raise themselves from their station as below livestock.

They think they’re better than livestock? Heavens forfend!

But some women think doing nothing is untenable, even if leaving is untenable. They should, they must, stay and fight, not just for themselves and their daughters, but for their future daughters, and their daughter’s daughters. And for their sons, too.

But what does it mean to stay and fight?

Salome (Claire Foy) has been incandescent with rage since the revelations of what’s happened, not because it happened to her, but because it happened to her tiny daughter. She is not afraid, when they are being coerced into forgiving the men, at the thought of damnation. If anything, she is committed to murder – she will murder the next man who tries to violate her daughter again. She is absolutely determined to stay, not for revenge, but because the other alternative is still unthinkable.

She has a mother, a living mother, Agata (Judith Ivey) who hears her rage, and realises how she herself has contributed to the turning of a blind eye, the “choice” to accept, to abnegate herself, to endure everything, thus aiding this atmosphere of permission, one that allowed the men to think they would get away with their abuses forever. And she apologises to them all, being the living saint that she is. And when their spirits get over-heated, she gently quotes some scripture, or leads them in singing hymns of praise to the Lord.

These women… these women, to whom the unspeakable has happened too many times (‘too many times’ means any time more than zero), never lose their faith. Their faith convinces them, eventually, that the Lord could never have intended for them to have to put up with this.

They never doubt in their faith. I find it staggering. But they (correctly) lay the blame where it should be, at the feet of the men who did this, do this, and the men that protect the other men with their twisted words mimicking piety but only providing cover for themselves.

This is an argument, an ongoing debate, of course. Another living saint, being Ona (Rooney Mara) is pregnant. She has no husband, no lover. And this isn’t an immaculate conception. So this has happened to her as well. But she cannot bring herself to hate the child growing within her, nor the men that made it happen, dooming her to a life of being called a whore even in this pious community, and even by the women who share her torment. She wonders whether the men of their community are victims as well, acting out roles they never wrote for themselves, just like the women.

I mean, ugh, bullshit. But I see where she is coming from, as do some of the elder womenfolk. Her sister Mariche (the great Jesse Buckley) mocks her, in fact mocks everyone who thinks anything could ever be different. As well as the horror of what is visited upon them all, Mariche (pronounced Mary-Kay) additionally suffers at the hands of a violent piece of shit called Klaus. Her mother Greta (Sheila McCarthy), in this overarching argument always telling stories about her two horses, is the one who admits that she was wrong in telling Mariche that she must forgive Klaus each time.

Whose anger needs to be assuaged? Why Mariche and not Salome, who vows to deliver Old Testament vengeance if she stays? Mariche endures the worst and mocks the others who don’t seem to bear it as stoically as she does, mocking as she does Mejal (Michelle McCloud), who experiences panic attacks when she remembers the shock of waking up after being assaulted, covered in blood. The only thing that can calm her is smoking. One of the few funny scenes in the flick has the women rolling and lighting a cigarette, and waving it under her nose like smelling salts to revive her.

All of these arguments sound like circular arguments, but I would happily watch each and every argument a thousand times, if it brings these captives closer to their barely grasped freedom. Sure, it sounds like a play, even though it doesn’t feel like one, and it’s mostly a group of desperate, terrified women trying to figure a way out when they have no visibility of an exit.

From the three choices, they whittle it down to one. The impossible choice, but the only one they can possibly make. Without even knowing where they are, they have decided they can be there no longer. And so begins a new chapter in their lives we never get to see.

It’s heartbreaking, and somehow hopeful, and it comes out of true horror, and it shows a group of women deciding for themselves that the best weapon they have to protect themselves and their children is to absent themselves from a world too cruel to live in, and I thought this was all put together so powerfully in such an incredible way.

I haven’t even talked about the wonderful character of August, who keeps the record, and who is there to listen to the women, and the heartbreaking nature of his character and his deep love of Ona, and the beautiful speech he gives about boys, and how wonderful, capricious, dangerous, fierce and loving they can be, and whether they can be saved from this culture around them…

Or the character of Melvin (August Winter) who, so traumatised by his rape by his brother, and the subsequent miscarriage, vows that he is a girl no more, now Melvin, and that he will speak no more forever. Except… when he thanks Agata, for calling him by his true name…

I cried a lot watching this film, mostly in shame, sometimes in anger, sometimes in gratitude.

I maybe didn’t love the colour desaturation that impacts adversely, in my opinion, on how we relate to the film. Doing that almost sepia tone can bring warmth, but it can also distance an audience or, for me, flatten the visuals, and it did that for me, a bit. Though of course it doesn’t detract from the performances, which are great across the board. And what a board it is.

I find it almost strange that Frances McDormand chose to absent herself from one of the more central roles in favour of letting another grand dame of Canadian cinema take her place, but I applaud her for doing so (it had to have been her choice because a) she’s Frances McDormand and b) she’s one of the producers). Both of the elders, my god, what great sensitivity and regret they bring to their roles.

Jesse Buckley, Rooney Mara and Claire Foy (especially) are also great, but they’re great in everything, so, really, praising them for excellence is like saying “business as usual”. Claire Foy is best known for playing the young queen in The Crown, but she deserves to be better known for this. Ye gods is she on fire in her scenes.

There’s lots of other stuff I love from this flick, but, honestly, I think I’ll stop there.

The thing that depresses me about this flick is that a) all of the awfulness of it actually happened, and it happened at a place called the Manitoba Colony, in Bolivia(!) Of the nine men who were accused (by the other men, for impinging upon their property rights with regards to “their” women), one was lynched, one left the country, and seven were convicted of rape, including the evil fuckhead who showed them how to do what they did with animal tranquillisers

But the part where the women leave – it never happened. They’re all still there. Sure, some of them have left, but not en masse, not together, not as a collective “Fuck. You.” to the men who did this and the men who willingly helped it to continue.

It’s thousands of women. And they’re still there.

That impacts on how I feel about it. It shouldn’t, it’s unfair, but it makes me feel worse. Maybe it should, but it makes the film feel a little dishonest (even as I acknowledge that I’m imposing an unfair standard, since it’s not pretending to be a documentary). I just…the scale of this awfulness is just too much, and an ending like that, well, it doesn’t feel right even if dramatically it’s an immense relief.

7 times this is a great film betrayed by reality, and the fact that men are awful and have always been awful out of 10

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“We didn't talk about our bodies. So when something like this happened there was no language for it. And without language for it, there was a gaping silence. And in that gaping silence was the real horror.” - Women Talking