Adapted from a book inspired by real events, Sarah Polley’s film watches the women of an evangelical community who are victims of rape speak, in the absence of their executioners. Theatrical and masterful.
As She Said, Blonde or A millionaire, Women Talking is a film initiated by Dede Gardner, co-president of the production company Plan B, of which Brad Pitt is the most prominent sales representative. With a certain courage, she agreed to produce this austere project which was originally suggested to her by Frances McDormand (the actress voluntarily only plays a secondary role in the film, which she also co-produces): it is McDormand the first who fell in love with the book by Miriam Toews published in 2018. Then Sarah Polley, actress author and child of the ball, was chosen to direct. The novel was inspired by a proven fact of gang rape of women of all ages by men belonging to the same Mennonite colony (the Amish are a cousin branch of this evangelical Christianity) in Bolivia, in 2009: the men drugged the women and convinced them when they woke up, at the sight of blood and stained sheets, that they were victims of demons or of their imagination, mad or witches. Toews the novelist, also from the Mennonite community, made this group crime repeated over several years the basis of her fiction.
philosophical dialogue
Nothing will be seen of the rapes, any more than the men, imprisoned in the city until the bail is paid. The title sums it all up: over two days, a dozen women who seem to be from another century talk to each other, quarrel, discuss urgently what to do before the return of their executioners. Either stay and fight, or leave, leave the colony. Entrenched in the vast barn that serves as the central setting, the women’s council reviews the possible options while each delivering a portrait of herself, in turn, strong and drawn character. Each actress also testifies for herself, invested, from Jessie Buckley as a rabid battered woman to Rooney Mara as a gentle illiterate philosopher, under the gaze of little girls, of a single man, scribe in love, feminist, and who adopts the point of view of a sparrow perched in the loft – the point of view of the innocent, the idiot.
It is a film of philosophical dialogue like there are few, that is to say a dialectical, theatrical work, where a tragic dilemma is collectively posed, which only intelligent and intelligible words can resolve. The film does not compromise with its device, and remains endearing despite its flaws. Beautiful group shots deceive an almost pompous art, a feverish or fervent fury succeeds bombastic dialogues. With his way of posing without ceremony, his unadulterated naivety, Women Talking takes the risk of displeasing one or the other camp of the adversaries as much, much too correct for candied anti-feminists, much too “quietist” for the most feminist activists. The best shot in the film happens to feature one of the older women mistaking the fogging of her glasses for her impending death. She too is wrong.
To oppose the authority of tyrants
To get a good idea, we can imagine in addition to Women Talking a program that would show Seven Womenthe Village, Witness, the Black Narcissus, Saint-Cyr. The film is part of a history of the representation of Puritanism in cinema as a way of taking stock with several (female) voices, of testing the rules of men, and ultimately of debating the best way to oppose the authority of tyrants. These are the “missionary films” where the isolation of the place takes precedence: the mission as a principle of orality and piety, of “trans-mission”. Dramatic and besieged space, gynaeceum threatened by an imminent external danger, this always gives films with very singular exotic accents.