Writer and Director: Sarah Polley
It arrives at the BFI London Film Festival 2022 with some of the biggest buzz of the year and rightly so. Sarah Polley’s Women Talking is an extraordinary examination of patriarchy, sexual violence, domestic abuse and collusive silence set in a small, isolated Mormon community but working as an allegory through which women’s voices and agency take centre stage. This is a movie you can expect to hear a great deal about in the months ahead.
Following a spate of violent sexual assaults and rapes perpetrated against tranquilised women late at night, the men are sent away while the women decide what to do next. Two clear options are arrived at – stay and fight back or leave – and a representative committee is appointed to make the final decision for everyone. But with just 24 hours to do so, the benefits of either option cannot be agreed upon, especially if they must betray their faith to save themselves.
Adapted from Miriam Toews’ novel, Women Talking is far more than a Twelve Angry Men-style jury trying to reach consensus, and while there are long scenes of discussion Polley is careful to manaqe this as a cinematic rather than a stagey experience. It centres around the hay loft town-hall style discussion where there is no chairperson or wrong opinion as everyone freely speaks their mind and Polley gives energy to these complex and sometimes circular debates that feel grounded in character experience and their individual and collective trauma.
And Women Talking is as much a multicharacter study as a reflection on that collective trauma, giving each woman and their point of view a fair hearing. But it is their Mormon faith upon which lie the rocks of the argument, can they stay without betraying their God and would leaving prevent greater crimes of revenge being committed. That gradations of this argument play out among the characters is fascinating as they debate the safety of their children, right and wrong, the uncertainty of the world beyond and the nature of forgiveness.
As Polley expands into the immediate aftermath of those attacks and the sentimental image of innocent children playing in the fields while their mothers and grandmothers shape the future, the culmination of those weighty discussions feels incredibly moving, particularly in the final scenes when the expansiveness of the gesture feels properly and incredibly pertinent.
The acting categories at next year’s award ceremonies will have a tough job deciding whether to nominate an exemplary turn from Claire Foy as Salome, violently determined to stay and destroy any man who comes for her family, Jessie Buckley’s proud Mormon wife whose terrible homelife won’t sway her or Rooney Mara’s sweet Ona, pregnant by her rapist. There are excellent performances from all of the principals in fact.
Only one man, August the kindly schoolteacher (Ben Whishaw) is allowed in this space to take the minutes, tasked with the job of better educating boys in the future. And that is the ultimate message of Women Talking, not that women need to stay or leave but that toxic masculinity and the ills of patriarchy must be educated out of existence by kindly thoughtfulness and responsibility. Amen to that!
Women Talking is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2022.
