Women Talking (2022)
dir. Sarah Polley
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2022 United Artists Releasing
Do nothing. Stay and fight. Leave.
These are the options up for debate in Women Talking. The people debating, the titular women doing the talking, are a self-appointed committee representing all of the women in their isolated Mennonite colony that eschews modern conveniences like electricity and observes a strict patriarchal hierarchy.
The reason for their secret meetings is about as horrifying as you could imagine. It’s come to light that certain men in the colony have been using cow tranquilizers on women and girls in the community in order to rape and abuse them. They know this because one of the victims caught them in the act.
Before this sickening revelation, the religious elders of the colony gaslighted the survivors by telling them that their mysterious injuries were the result of evil spirits, which the women unwittingly invited as punishment for their sins. Sometimes they simply called the women liars, attributing the stories of being attacked to “wild female imagination.”
That last detail comes from the 2018 Miriam Toews novel upon which Women Talking is based. The novel, in turn, is a fictional rendering of actual events that occurred between 2005 and 2009 within a Mennonite colony in Bolivia. As a righteous act of defiance, both the book and the film – in introductory text – reclaim what’s been taken from these women and countless others who have suffered sexual violence by heralding this fictional creation as “an act of female imagination.”
Do nothing. Stay and fight. Leave.
The striking thing about Women Talking is the multiple ways in which one can read it. As a straightforward narrative, it’s about a group of women facing the shattering decision to upend their lives completely in order to assert their agency and to create a safe environment for themselves. It can also be read as an allegory; this isolated Mennonite colony is a stand-in for our broader patriarchal society and how survivors react in the face of abuse.
Ona, who is pregnant with her rapist’s child, initially wants to stay and fight. She represents women who fight for change from within the existing framework.
Joining her in this view are Mejal as well as Salome, whose young daughter was assaulted. They are both enraged and want to see changes in the community.
Mariche, whose husband is physically abusive, insists that forgiveness is the only way forward.
The old woman of the group, Scarface Janz – we’re never told how the character got the long, deep scar running down her cheek, but it’s safe to assume male violence was the cause – is firmly in the do-nothing camp. She represents women who have resigned themselves to the current power dynamic and can’t imagine any other way to live. Janz storms out of the meeting when the vote is a tie between the latter two options, excluding the possibility of doing nothing.
There are two men allowed in the meeting. One of them, August, is there because the women want to document their deliberations. They need him for this, as women in the colony are forbade from learning to read or write. In the allegory reading of the movie, August represents the decent men in the world who share empathy for the cause of female empowerment and justice.
August’s family was excommunicated because his mother asked too many uncomfortable questions, but, as the only college-educated member of the group, August was allowed to return to act as the colony’s sole teacher for the boys. If the women decide to leave, Ona asks August – who has romantic feelings for her – to stay so that he can help stop the cycle of abuse by teaching the boys that women aren’t property for their use.
Stay and fight. Leave.
The real magic of Women Talking is in exactly that. The film blossoms as these women do nothing more than talk. (I will admit that all this talking does give the movie a stage-bound quality. I would easily have believed it was based on a play rather than a book, if I hadn’t known better.) They argue with one another and console one another and cajole one another to make their case in the few precious hours they have while most of the colony’s men are away, securing bail for the accused. They are in an impossible situation. If they stay, there is a real chance they will lose the fight and things will go back to the way they’ve always been. If they leave, they are cutting themselves off from their entire world.
Director and screenwriter Sarah Polley, who has focused on intimate, female-driven narratives like Away from Her, Take This Waltz, and a piercing documentary about her own family life titled Stories We Tell, makes pages and pages of dialog explode like a finely orchestrated fireworks display. Polley, with the help of her stellar cast, establishes a rhythm with the dialog that ebbs and flows as the women make their impassioned cases for staying or leaving. I was enthralled from start to finish with hearing the debate and how it shapes each character’s arc over the course of the picture.
I wish I had been as enthralled with other aspects of Polley’s movie. There is an overreliance on voiceover narration that, more often than not, serves as a way to tell us what we should be thinking instead of showing us something and trusting us to make the connection on our own.
In one moment, the women break into a bout of laughter in response to something someone has said. It acts as a wonderful pressure-release valve moment, but one that illustrates a sadder truth. Seconds after I made this connection, the voiceover narration slips in to make sure I didn’t miss it: “Sometimes I think people laugh as hard as they want to cry.”
It’s a minor issue, but Women Talking is also a bit of a tonal jumble. The few moments of levity that Polley interjects into her film feel like they’re coming from a different universe. At one point, a census taker drives through the fields where the colony makes their home. This is how we learn that the movie is set in 2010, and the census taker alerts the women to the fact that one of the colony men will be back sooner than expected to procure extra bail money.
In an effort to get people who are reluctant to be counted for the census to come out of their homes, the census taker blasts the Monkees hit Daydream Believer from a bullhorn on his truck. The song is out of place with regard to the film’s overall tone, but it does act as a tantalizing peak into the world these women might be encountering soon should they decide to leave.
There is also a moment when one of the young girls in the meeting decides to play a prank by jumping out of the window of the hayloft where the meeting is being held; unbeknownst to the women in the heat of rhetorical battle, she lands safely on a large pile of hay below. It’s a way for us to see these women as more than the trauma they have suffered, but it ultimately clashes with the meticulous atmosphere Polley and her actors are otherwise conjuring.
Luc Montpellier’s cinematography is one of the most frustrating things about Women Talking. On an almost scene-by-scene basis, Montpellier’s muted photography vacillates between something you might see in a Terrence Malick film – there are various magic-hour infused shots, with the camera roaming through fields, that are evocative of Days of Heaven or The Tree of Life – and instances where I felt eye strain because that same magic-hour effect was too dark, like they were filmed after the production had lost too much of the light, but there was nothing to be done about it.
The ensemble assembled for Women Talking is nothing short of incredible. Each character is fully formed, and the actors make clear how a trauma response can look wildly different from person to person. In particular, Claire Foy – best known for her stint as Queen Elizabeth II in the first two seasons of The Crown – as Salome, and Jessie Buckley – whom I discovered in the disorienting I’m Thinking of Ending Things – as Mariche are both incendiary. English actor Ben Whishaw evinces a quiet sorrow as August.
Frances McDormand is excellent, as always, as Scarface Janz, although it’s a shame we only get to see her for a few brief minutes. McDormand also served as a co-producer on Women Talking.
The women are given the “opportunity” to forgive their attackers. If, when the men return, the women do not forgive them, it’s the victims who will be cast out of the community. “Is forgiveness that’s forced upon us really forgiveness,” one woman asks the group. Several of the women see through this directive from the elders as an attempt to reinforce the male power structure. Janz is convinced to her bones that if the women do not forgive the perpetrators, God will withhold his own gift of forgiveness from the women.
This atheist found a rooting interest in the character who asks why their loving and just God would allow such a thing to happen to his children. It’s an excellent question, one that, in its millions of different forms – why would God allow terminal cancer in children, why would God allow natural disasters to kill indiscriminately, etc., etc. – has never been satisfactorily answered, at least to my mind, by a countless number of apologists.
A more fruitful question, one that Women Talking explores in subtle and heartbreaking ways, is how trauma manifests in wildly different and unexpected ways depending on the psychology of the survivor. One woman suffers intense panic attacks. Another chides her for not being able to handle her emotions, for not dealing with her circumstances in the right way.
Another character, Melvin, is a trans man who stopped speaking and transitioned to traditionally masculine clothes and hairstyle after he was raped and then suffered more unimaginable trauma. When Rae and I were talking about the movie after we finished it, I mentioned that I thought it was unrealistic that anyone in this isolated, deeply religious, Christian fundamentalist community would even have the vocabulary to express or regard trans identities.
My wife saw it as much more nuanced than that. Melvin transitioned as a response to the severe trauma he suffered. (Please understand that I am not – nor do I think that the movie is – suggesting that trans people are trans solely because of trauma. That is demonstrably not the case.)
It was a perspective I hadn’t considered, most likely because I’m a straight, cis-gendered, middle-aged white man who has (thankfully) experienced very little trauma over the course of life so far. As Women Talking demonstrates, it’s imperative to listen to survivors, especially when they are a member of a historically marginalized group. The only hope to end violence against women is for people like me to stage our own real-life sequel: Men Listening.
Why it got 4 stars:
- While there were aspects of Women Talking that didn’t work for me, ultimately this is an important story, and one which Sarah Polley and her cast realize with delicate care.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I was irrationally happy to see a modern update of the old Orion Pictures logo at the start of the movie. Apparently, Orion was revived by its owner, MGM, in 2014, but I don’t know that I’ve seen the logo on a movie between then and now. I was instantly taken back to my formative years of the late 1980s and early 90s upon seeing it. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
- One of the most devastating lines of the movie comes when Mejal, in the aftermath of a panic attack, says to the other women, about being gaslighted, “They made us disbelieve ourselves. That was worse…”
- Most of the comic relief in Women Talking didn’t work for me, but there is one laugh-out-loud moment (or as close as you can get to such a thing in a movie as heavy as this) as one of the women gets a popular vulgarity wrong when she tells someone else to, “Fuck it off!”
- The women’s interest in maps (“We need a map of the world, so we can understand our place in it.”) served to remind me how empowering a good education is and how I often take it for granted. These women can’t read or write. The thought of abandoning everything you’ve ever known without so much as the ability to read or write would be absolutely overwhelming.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- The screener disc I got from the studio was defective, so I ponied up the $3.99 (plus tax) to rent Women Talking on Amazon. At some point after I watched it, the movie was added to Amazon Prime (meaning you can watch it for free with a Prime subscription), but the website is telling me it is only available that way for another four days (meaning until 03/12, the day of the Oscars ceremony). If you miss your chance on Prime, it is available to rent on most major VOD streaming outlets.