Though the structures that allow for abuse on a level as depicted in Women Talking exist across many secluded religious communities, the text itself is in fact inspired directly by one event. In the late 2000s a series of sexual assaults were committed against the women of the Mennonite Manitoba Colony in Bolivia, initially blamed by the colony’s elders on ghosts and demons. It was eventually found that the men were systemically drugging the women in their sleep and several were arrested and ultimately sentenced by Bolivian authorities. Some justice was enacted, but on hearing such a horrific story, it doesn’t seem enough. Canadian author Miriam Toews (who’d already written a book about the repression of a conservative Mennonite upbringing that was also turned into a movie last year) clearly thought so, writing Women Talking as a conscious response to the atrocity -a book designed around the women's voices, their pain, and their agency in the aftermath of this.
And it’s quite fortunate that that book caught the attention of both Frances McDormand and Sarah Polley -McDormand of course a four-time Oscar winner with enormous sway in Hollywood, and Polley a supremely talented Canadian filmmaker and national treasure who’s been sorely missed of late. She’s one of those figures who every Canadian film fan should want to see succeed: her work as a child actress in films like Baron Munchausen and The Sweet Hereafter is some of the best of its kind, and as a director both her features, Away From Her and Take This Waltz, deserve to be on any list of the greatest Canadian movies.
Women Talking is not a Canadian movie, in spite of its’ writer-director and original author, but it would on several fronts live up to the expectations set by Polley’s other works, in that it too deals with complicated relationships between women and men. What’s curious about this film though compared to those, and which is one of its core strengths, is its sterner edge and the near total elimination of men from the conversation.
Essentially, the movie takes the form of a series of conversations -broken up by momentary flashbacks or recesses- had between the women of this Mennonite colony while the men are all away in the city dealing with the bail of a few attackers who were caught and arrested. As almost all the women have been victimized at some point (and most repeatedly) they organize to decide what to do. With minutes being taken by the one man permitted to stay, August (Ben Whishaw), the colony schoolteacher whose mother was excommunicated, the women debate the merits and drawbacks of a trifecta of voted-on options: stay and do nothing, stay and fight, or leave.
Polley engages thoughtfully and honestly with this discussion, difficult though it may be given some of the viewpoints expressed. Each argument has a particular champion, with the fierce and vengeful Salome (Claire Foy) the most prominent voice on the fighting front, while the conservative, guarded Mariche (Jessie Buckley) reacts in hostile opposition, making the case for forgiveness. In between them and eventually the chief representative for leaving is the pregnant Ona (Rooney Mara), coded a bit typically the audience surrogate. But still each side is heard and given a degree of responsible credence that their unique circumstance and perspective as isolated Mennonite women allows. Faith plays a major role, devotion does too, and motherhood –values that they have been brought up to cherish but are now being strained in the context of severe, unassailable trauma. A chief segment of the debate deals in what to do with the children, and whether the boys of a certain age are already too corrupted by their male elders. In a very organic sense the film has these frank discussions on sexual violence, patriarchy and inherited toxic masculinity, and it does not mince much. Though no sexual violence is shown, its’ scars are illustrated dramatically –never more so than in the case of one character, Melvin (August Winter), a transgender boy who has been mute since his attack.
And yet the film doesn’t dwell wholly in the trauma, as much as it hangs over the proceedings. It finds the right moments to be light, even funny, to bask in the bond of these women rarely so long in each others’ company. I particularly appreciated the interest it took with the elders; though Frances McDormand’s Scarface Janz is a lost cause from early on, Polley makes considerable space for the wisdom of Agata, played by stage legend Judith Ivey, and the parables told by Greta (a scene-stealing Sheila McCarthy) of her horses Ruth and Cheryl. The whole movie is in fact presented brilliantly in kind of a parable style, framed by a narration device which, like the similarly feminist fable Daughters of the Dust, is told in a past tense by the unborn child of one of the colonists. Polley steers clear of specifics in her script, never identifying the exact location or even the name of the colony, removing the narrative from any context barring a brief scene establishing a year of 2010. The assailants are unseen and enigmatic -cast by the script as phantoms who hold considerable sway in their absence. And of course the story ultimately plays out its’ morality tale with that certainty of conviction and a vital dose of idealism. It is engineered around the importance of its’ message and shrouded in just enough considered vagueness in tone and aesthetic, so as to be immediately resonating.
Emissaries of the theme and this frame, the ensemble cast is the movies’ driving force. They all work together and serve the needs of the script impeccably well, though the starkest stand-outs are naturally Foy and Buckley, working as they are with the two most impassioned characters. Each is gifted with an excellent showcase of emotional depth punctuated by at least one profoundly affecting monologue, and it’s a great delight to see two of the most compelling actresses of recent years work wonders with some of their best material. I found the trajectory of Buckley’s choices with Mariche especially engaging and gratifying.
However, all of this comes in a movie that has a very restrictive visual palette that can be unattractive to watch. It’s a gray, de-saturated affair with very little life in both its’ colour scheme and visual language -a stark departure from the warm vibrancy of Polley’s last film Take This Waltz. She shoots it this way presumably to accentuate the bleakness of the circumstance and the general oppression of life for women in this colony (something I would argue is better achieved by Hildur Guðnadóttir’s ambient score), but it’s an exhaustive blandness that undercuts those moments of optimism and makes the whole film out to be cold and detached, when it should be radiating intimacy. The image on the poster of the two women holding hands in solidarity is way more striking and evocative than the shot when it comes up in the actual movie.
This has a slight numbing effect on the films’ quality, but it does subside next to the performances and the earnestness of the script. It can’t keep down Polley’s smartest choices, the ways she ties together each of the women’s priorities, draws on a key Biblical allusion, and makes no compromise on the pain while insisting her women are not defined by it. And it’s ultimate stance is pretty bold the more you think about it, the more it intersects with the ways we talk about misogyny, patriarchy, and sexual violence in the wider culture. It’s a bit trite to say that Women Talking advocates for more of just what its’ title says, but that really is the key. When it comes to subject matter and traumas like these, let’s just say there’s a good reason for men to be withheld from the conversation.
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